Scarlett Johansson is Major - that term can be the name of her character or a statement about her screen presence. If recent cinema history has taught us anything, it’s that we love to watch her kill people more than almost anything else. Her role in “Ghost in the Shell” is a human brain in a body full of synthetic parts and she works as an assassin, one of the only reliable professions in the cyborg-laden future of film.
Starting with her role as Jordan Two Delta in “The Island” in the mid-aughts, Johansson has been increasingly separated from her body in films like “Under the Skin,” “Her,” and “Lucy” (one hopes she’s separated from her mind while playing Black Widow in that ceaseless string of Marvel movies).
In her new film, Johansson’s Major leaps from skyscrapers - she is perfect soldier in a perfect body - and crashes through the windows below. She flickers, cloaks herself in invisibility, and makes her presence known only by the bullets she fires. When the killings are complete, she strolls in and out of rooms with a shoulders-forward strut and withering sideways glances.
When she is wounded on the job, Major is tended to by her designer/creator, Dr. Ouelet (Juliette Binoche, who built her magnificent career by picking better roles than this one). The good doctor works in a Hanka Robotics lab that matches almost exactly the facilities on the HBO show “Westworld.” When Major asks about mysterious images appearing in her night-vision-enhanced eyes, Ouelet explains that these memories are “sensory glitches” in her mind, which is a nice definition to give your woman-machine while stitching up her lacerations.
In a nod to her breakout role, Johansson is photographed as she was in “Lost in Translation,” reclining under magic hour light in her skivvies. It occurs to one that Bill Murray would’ve been good in this film, as well, though the wise older gentleman in this piece is Aramaki (“Beat” Takeshi Kitano). He mostly just has to sit there being himself for a couple hours dispensing bon mots in Japanese like, “Don’t send a rabbit to kill a fox.”
Aside from Kitano, this film version of “Ghost in the Shell” is heavily whitewashed from the original manga - even the streets of this unnamed eastern metropolis are devoid of people of color. Many sequences from the film do nothing to dispel the notion that director Rupert Sanders gazes from white, Western eyes - there are the standard shots of geisha fetishizing, yakuza club fighting, and reflection pool gazing. In her downtime, Major chills under the sea amid enormous man-o-war jellyfish and cracks beers and almost-jokes with her platonic comrade in arms, Batou (Pilou Asbæk).
The cadre of good guy assassins is under attack from a mysterious bad assassin called Kuze (Michael Pitt, who has added “Carmen” as a middle stage name, making his permanent lip pout all the more poignant). As an older model of cybernetic, Kuze is left without his own personal doctor, and thus shows a more metallic underbelly than Major - he skulks around the shadows, Man in the Iron Mask-erading.
What Kuze offers Major is a revelation about her pre-cyborg life, an explanation for why those memory glitches keep popping up in her field of vision, and an acknowledgment of the ghosted soul stuck in her violent carapace.
The film aspires to a futurism in between Tokyo and Hong Kong, in between “Blade Runner” and “The Fifth Element,” but lacks the flavor of those cities and sci-fi touchstones - it has little savor except for sentimentality.
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