Ghost In The Shell

Ghost in the Shell
Or
The Disappointing Dangers of an Asimovian Future

@NormFromCheers



In the future, cyborgs are things. The Hanka Corporation is at the forefront of that technology, partnering with the government, and, more specifically, the military. They outfit, repair and improve wounded soldiers, upgrading and augmenting various body parts and functions. We know all of this because of the opening crawl.

We then cut to a dying Scarlett Johansson, the last survivor of an apparent terrorist attack, or so she's told. As she enters the final boarding process, a team of red-suited doctors rush her down a hallway, the backshot revealing Hanka logos on their backs.

They wheel her in to a room, and harvest her brain. The brain is then inserted in to a 'Shell," a synthetic body. This body then goes through several 3D printers, which fashion, muscle, skin and hair on to the shell. There is then a very literal birthing scene, where the shell passes through a placenta-looking chamber, emerging out the other side.

ScarJo then needs to learn to breathe, so Dr. Ouelet, played by Juliette Binoche (Steve Carrell's love interest from Dan In Real Life), coaches her through it. After she gets the whole breathing thing down, Ouelet introduces herself, and tells ScarJo that they built her a new body, and that she's the first of her kind. After that intro, a fella called Cutter tells Ouelet that ScarJo's been designated for Section 9, whatever that is. Ouelet protests that Cutter's reducing ScarJo from a complex human to a machine, and Cutter responds that she's not a machine, she's a weapon.

One year later, ScarJo's called The Major, and she's part of the federal counterterrorism unit called Section 9. She runs a team consisting of an Asian gal, a Japanese fella and Euron Greyjoy from Game of Thrones, shown here with a blonde buzzcut that makes him look like the poor man's Kieffer Sutherland.

The landscape of Tokyo is dominated by obnoxiously large holographic ads. I'm talking building-size bastards, which must be hell at night for city residents. I can't imagine the amount of light pollution this shit generates.

Michael Wincott, the bad guy from The Crow, is a high-ranking Hanka executive holding a dinner meeting with the King of an unnamed African nation. King is reticent to institute a national  program for cyborg enhancements, in that it would detract from humanity's individuality, but Wincott is adamant that it can only benefit his country.

As they're chatting, a bunch of geisha-bots enter the room and make at serving for a bit. Major's staking out this meeting on a tip that it'll be attacked. She scans the meeting and sees the geisha-bots, but is forbidden from engaging by her boss, Aramaki. The geisha-bots then pull a few of the dinner party away from the table, transforming in to fuckin' spider-like creatures whilst doing so. A bunch of poorly-augmented guys in suits then enter the room and begin spraying the rest of the table with gunfire.

Major ignores Aramaki's directive and dives off the building to engage. Whilst diving, she engages a camouflage suit she's wearing, rendering her invisible to the visible light spectrum. At some point she also apparently hooks up to a rope line, and she beings shooting the gunthugs through the windows. After she's pick off a fair number of them, she swings through the window and dispatches the rest. While she's Cowgirl Pearl-ing her way through the room, one of the geisha-bots hooks in to Wincott's neckport and more or less hacks his brain, which kills him. As she dispatches that Geisha-bot, the last surviving gunthug raises his pistol to shoot her in the back, only to be dispatched himself by Euron Greyjoy.

Apparently Major was hit at some point his this encounter, so she storms out, and returns to Hanka headquarters for repairs. As Ouelet is repairing her, she chastises her for being so cavalier, pointing out that while her shell is tough, it is not invincible. This prompts Major to quip, "Maybe next time you can design me better." She then mentions that she's been experiencing 'glitches' in her vision - she keeps seeing a burning house once in at apparently random times, with no apparent trigger or reason. Ouelet dismisses these as coding errors, and tells Major not to worry about them.

After she's repaired, she heads back to Section 9 headquarters, where Aramaki has just finished being dressed down by Cutter for letting Major sustain damage. He goes so far as to threaten to shut down Section 9, whilst Aramaki points out that he answers to the Japanese Prime Minister, not Cutter. Aramaki debriefs the team, and pairs the team off in twos, assigning each pair a task in the ensuing investigation. The team learns that four Hanka scientists, including Wincott, were attacked and hacked, meaning there's a larger plot afoot. Major and Euron are assigned to return to Hanka headquarters, where the Gehsia-bots are being dismantled and examined. On their way, they stop at a meat market to pick up discarded bones, because Euron feeds them to a pack of strays that are his de facto pets.

They arrive at Hanka, and the lobby is shown to have a shit ton of ED-209-looking motherfuckers that really look like they could fuck some shit up. When they get to the lab, they meet a Hanka scientist who says that she would need weeks to properly decode the Geisha-bots, but can tell that they hacked and transmitted the data from Wincott, and sent them to someone called Kuze. Since she can't tell where this Kuze is located right the fuck now, Major impulsively decides to to a 'Deep Dive,' jacking in to the Geisha-bot via hardwire, which is an unsecured and unencrypted connection that could result in her data corruption or hijacking. Before anyone can stop her, she jacks on and dives in to the code, which of course has a visually physical representation, like a goddamn early-90's hacker movie. Major navigates the literal hallways of the Geisha-bot's memory, ending up in a digital basement facing an apparent digital representation of Kuze. He attacks he, trying to hack her code.

Euron sees her physical reaction to this digital assault, and shouts at the scientist to "GET HER OUT OF THERE! SHE'S BEING HACKED!" in case we hadn't figured that out. The scientist vainly struggles to comply, until Euron gives up waiting and just physically pulls the plug. If that was an option all along, why wait? Anyway, after Major recovers her faculties, she says she knows where Kuze is: a Yakuza club.

The team elects to go in covertly, with backup in the wings if they need to come heavy. Major disguises herself by donning a trench coat (a lazy goddamn disguise, but whatever), and initiates Mind Comms with the team (a prom of telepathy). She orders a drink, but is then whisked in to a private room with a stripper pole. At gunpoint, she's chained to the stripper pole, and tazed repeatedly with a cattle prod. Apparently this room she's been ushered in to blocks her comms with the team, prompting Euron to go in to the club and get a drink.

All the while, Major's being tazed and interrogated as to her nature, because the Yakuza folks can see that she's not quite human. Euron is immediately sussed out by the Yakuza folk, and a shootout ensues. Euron kills the shit out of all present, freeing Major in the process. They explore the basement levels of the club, encountering the area that was digitally shown during Major's Deep Dive. They see what they think is Kuzo, and try to take him down, only for him to be revealed to be a hologram concealing enough explosives to orbit Arnold Schwarzenegger, rigged to a timer. The time goes off, and Major does her best to shield Euron from the ensuing explosion.

In the aftermath, it is shown that Major's body has been severely damaged, making for an almost frame-off restoration. This takes a while, and Major asks after Euron during her repairs. All the technician will tell her is that he's mostly fine. Major again brings up her visual glitches, and asserts they're getting worse, and impairing her efficiency. Ouelet again dismisses her concerns, and then her.

After her repairs are completed, she seeks out Euron, and finds him undergoing ocular augmentation. Evidently he was entirely unharmed in the blast, except for his eyes, which doesn't make any goddamn sense, but fuck it. So he's getting super eyes, giving him several different options for his fields of vision, from infrared to x-ray. We leave him while he's still calibrating his new peepers.

Meanwhile, Aramaki is again dressed down by Cutter, this time for allowing Major to Deep Dive and potentially corrupt her coding. He's clearly getting tired of these motherfucking reprimands on this motherufking plane, but he emotes like Kristen Stewart.

Meanwhile again, Major trolls the Hooker District, and picks out a hooker by asking if she's fully human. She assets that she is, and Major takes her home. What ensues can only be described as wholly unerotic and weird.

Elsewhere, the Hanka scientist that helped with the Deep Dive is putting in a late night at the lab. Kuze breaks in (which leads me to question the efficacy of having an army of ED-209's guarding your door if any old asshole can waltz in), and confronts the scientist for her involvement in something called Project 2571. At first she claims ignorance, but eventually resignedly confess sorrow and regret at her involvement, before Kuze kills her by pulling apart her augmented eyes and hacking her until she dies.

Major investigates the crime scene, finding a data cube and folder denoting Project 2571. From it, she gleans that all the Hanka scientist recently murdered worked on this Project, which was the construction of an all-synthetic shell powered by a human brain. It's exactly like Major, only this project failed. The only remaining scientist living is Dr. Ouelet.

As Major is piecing this together, Kuze is tracking Ouelet's movements. He hijacks two garbage men in a garbage truck parked along Ouelet's route while she's out and about, and uses the men and the truck to attack her. The truck rams Ouelet's car, overturning it and trapping her security detail. The garbage me get out with automatic weapons, and begin spraying the vehicle  with a hail of bullets. Major and her team pull up mid-attack, and save the doctor, who steals away amidst all the mayhem.

One of the garbage men is taken alive, and her team interrogates him in a two-way mirror cube, using a hologram projected in to interact with said garbage man. Unfortunately, he doesn't remember a damn thing, and to top it off, he's had a series of false memories concerning a non-existent family implanted to confuse the shit out of everyone.

Mid-interrogation, Kuze hacks in to the supposedly secure and isolated interrogation system, solely to taunt Major's team. Since he can't hear anything outside the cube, the team decides to try to track Kuze, but need to keep him on the line (nonsense) for the trace to complete. Major defies her orders and jacks in to the box to keep Kuze on the line (fucking nonsense). They banter back and forth for a while until the trace is complete (goddamn fucking nonsense), and then the call, for lack of a better term, is terminated.

Major and Euron lead an attack on Kuze's location, a disused warehouse. Inside, they find rows and rows of bodies hanging in bags, hooked up to data cables and ostensibly still alive. They trek further in, and find rooms full of monks, gathered in circles and also jacked in to data cables. Major deduces that Kuze is setting up his own VPN, using people's data ports as nodes on said network.

Major and Euron are then separated, and Major is captured by Kuze. He strings her up, but does not harm her. Instead, he palavers with her, revealing that he knows all about her true nature. He then reveals that he is like her, a brain in a shell (defined as a cerebral salvage), only he's slowly breaking down and falling in to disrepair. His face is shown for the first time all movie, and he's played by Michael Pitt (the good actor on Boardwalk Empire killed in Season 2). He reveals that he is Project 2571, and that he remembers the process by which he was created, having been vivisected and dismembered while still alive to make said cerebral salvage.As Euron is about to find them, Kuze sets her free, instructs her to question her memories of her death, and runs off. As Euron shows up, Major ditches him and runs off on her own.

Major finds her way to Ouelet, and questions her about her existence. Ouelet reveals that she is the 99th iteration of the Shell program, and that sacrifices were made in the name of science. She pleads with Major to see that she is the future of the human condition, a way to cheat death, and so what if that death was prematurely induced? Ouelet and her team kept getting fresh bodies ('test subjects'), and didn't ask too many questions about where they came from. However, she DOES. Recall that Major's body was brought in personally by Cutter, though she doesn't know the circumstances surrounding her death. She does know that her past that she remembers is bullshit, made up by Cutter to try to ease the transition. This was necessary because all 98 before her failed to take, and Ouelet's theory was because of a knowledge of their condition.

Armed with all of this new info regarding her existence, Major turns off her built-in tracker as she leaves Ouelet's to go off the grid on her own to contemplate shit. This involves literal diving in Tokyo Bay, motionlessly floating at the bottom. She does this uninterrupted until a fishing lure trolls by her head, rousing her from her contemplative state. Evidently this is a common thing for her, because Euron's found her pretty easily and parked a boat above her head. Euron volunteers to take her back to Hanka for some more diagnostics, but upon docking, a cadre of Hanka security tazes and subdues Major.

Cutter has figured out that Ouelet told Major some of the truth of her existence, and decides that Major is now too much of a liability. So as she's being examined under the pretense of finally fixing her glitches, Cutter orders Ouelet to inject Major in the back of the brain with a fatal does of red stuff that'll kill her. As Ouelet mimes at compliance, she switches syringes, and injects Major with a stimulant of some fashion and slips her an apartment key with an address on it. Major has figured out that Cutter wants her dead, so she escapes post-haste. Cutter then shoots Ouelet, but calls it in as Major having killed her and going rogue. Nobody in Section 9 believes this, but they all play along to assuage Cutter and avoid raising his suspicions.

Major tracks down the apartment address on the key, and a little middle-aged woman lives there alone. She's attention-starved, so as Major walks by she invites her in for tea. Bewildered, Major accepts. The woman walks Major through her apartment and her life, explains that she's been lost since her teenage daughter ran away a year ago to join an anti-technology movement based in an area called the Lawless Zone. The government said she committed suicide in said Lawless Zone shortly thereafter, which has always seemed off to her. She's perfectly preserved her daughter's room under sheets of plastic for no apparent reason/. All of this feel very familiar to Major, and she feels sorry for the woman. Major begins to think that this woman may be her mother, and that she may be her daughter. She leaves for the Lawless Zone to investigate further.

On her way there, she reactivates her Mind Comms with Aramaki and explains her innocence, position and intentions. Aramaki concurs, and tells her to be careful. Aramaki then gets in to his car with a briefcase, but is ambushed by a group of Hanka security, who try to gun him down. They fail spectacurly, because his briefcase is bulletproof, and he's carrying a revolver than evidently hold infinity rounds. Aramaki kills the shit out of them, and Mind Comm contacts the rest of the team to inform them of Hanka's treachery. Consequently, the whole team is ready for Hanka's attempted ambushes, and they fail spectacularly in their assassination attempts.

Major arrives in the Lawless Zone, and finds the building she keeps seeing in her glitchier moments. It actually exists, kind of, in that it's mostly destroyed. Kuze then walks in, and tells her that they used to live in this building, when it was whole. He shows her several pictures and trinkets that have survived the destruction of the building, which Major then remembers was perpetrated at the hands of Cutter personally, as he led an incursion in to the Lawless Zone to destroy the anti-technology faction they were both a part of.

As they're reminiscing, Cuttter commandeers a Spider Tank, which is a tank whose primary means of locomotion is a set of spider legs, like goddamn Wild Wild West (I wonder if Jon Peters was involved in this film (Google Jon Peters Kevin Smith. Smith's story about this is fucking hilarious)). Cutter blows the shit out of the rubble of said building, fucking up Kuze something fierce, and knocking Major senseless. As he chases her (slowly, I might add, since the Spider Tank looks cool but whose means of locomotion seems slow as fuck), he monologues about his evil plan and how Major and Kuze are wrong and didn't make a difference in the world until Cutter killed him. He tries to kill Kuze, but Major regains her bearings and attacks the tank, pulling the tank apart with her bare hands so hard she dismembers herself.

However, Cutter apparently didn't trust his arachnid engine of destruction, as he has a sniper team in a helicopter circling the area as insurance. The team snipes Kuze's head, destroying his brain. As they're about to do the same to Major, her team arrives and shoots down the helicopter, killing the sniper team. After the sniper team goes down, Aramaki finds Cutter, and kills the shit out of him, per the instruction of the Prime Minister.

Major gets a rebuild, and reunites with her team. At the end of the movie, they're still running Ops, with Major still taking point. In the final shot, she's wearing a black duster, as per usual, and she discards it before she activates her camo and dives down a building again, like in the first scene. Side note: if she discards her leather duster evert time she activates her camo, she's gotta be spending a fortune on those.

Overall, I give this a 2 Broken Robots out of 5. As much as I wanted to like this, there were just too many holes, inconsistencies and omissions to really ever get onboard. This feels like a missed opportunity.