‘Ghost in the Shell’ misses the mark

Brandon Cowan, Reporter

Based on the Japanese manga “Ghost in the Shell” and directed by Rupert Sanders, “Ghost in the Shell” (2017) is one of the most boring movies I have ever seen. Major, played by Scarlett Johansson, is a police officer that only has her brain and a cyborg body. She was implanted with memories to make her the perfect weapon to fight terrorism. The setting for the movie was in Tokyo in the future. The futuristic city was shown throughout the movie, and it was creative and interesting to see what a city in the far future could look like. This movie focused on cyberterrorism. The terrorist could hack into a person’s mind in order to alter their memories. I really like sci-fi movies, but this one has some of the worst dialogue that I have ever had to listen to.

During the entire movie, Johansson is playing this robot that is supposed to not have any emotions and it gets boring fast. I could not stand listening to people talk in this movie. I wanted to just leave the theater every time Johansson opened her mouth and started talking. Another problem with the dialogue is that part of the movie is in Japanese, but for some reason the person that speaks Japanese can understand English and everybody else that is speaking English can understand the one guy that is speaking Japanese. It makes no sense. They should have just made the person speak English because it makes the movie even more of a joke. The movie is filled with this question of what part of the human body is actually the person’s identity. Major had all of her memories deleted when she was a child, but her “ghost,” or soul, is ques
tioned to be what makes her who she is. The movie never went into much detail about this and it felt really lacking about this plot point.

I was disappointed with this question because it could have been explained in much more detail that would have been interesting. During the movie, I was constantly thinking about wanting to watch the original movie made in 1995. The older one was an animation, but I could still connect with the characters more than the 2017 live-action movie. There were many action scenes that had slow-motion effects. It was really cheesy and did not fit with the tone of the movie at all.

(1.5 out of 5)