'Ghost in the Shell' Movie Review

Hello, fellow moviegoers!
   Ghost in the Shell is directed by Rupert Sanders, and it stars Scarlett Johannsen, Pilou Asbæk, and Takeshi Kitano. It tells the story of Major, a cyber-enhanced soldier that is designed to be the most effective agent out there. 

   This new Ghost in the Shell is like food from a good restaurant reheated in the microwave. It’s something that was once great, and you felt like your money was well spent on it when you had it the first time around. Now, however, it’s unevenly cooked, it tastes really bland, and you end up not finishing it and throwing into the trash.
   This was one of the most boring action movies that I have ever seen. Throughout the entirety of the film’s runtime, I never found myself entertained. Not once does it feel like a cohesive film. It feels like the people behind the scenes threw a collection of scenes together, said “Good enough!”, and then put it in theaters for the world to see. While watching this film, I had to actively focus on the movie, not because it had a complicated plot, but because the film was so monotonous and disinteresting. Watching a movie should never feel like a chore! The feeling of sitting through this movie is not unlike that you get from watching a documentary in your High School History class. Except, in this case, you have the choice as to whether to watch it or not (You shouldn’t.)
   It wasn’t just the audience that was bored with this movie, it felt like the cast was too. Almost all of them gave extremely wooden performances, especially Scarlett Johansson. I was torn over whether or not she was being purposefully robotic or not. I get that her character is cybernetically enhanced, but if she was trying to be robotic, then she failed, and if she was genuinely trying to act like a human being, then she also failed. Her performance was somewhere in between human and robot. Which sounds like a good thing. A happy medium, right? Wrong. It came off as her just giving a really bad performance that you'd expect from a straight-to-DVD movie.
    Not everything in this movie was bad, though. In fact, there was one thing that I thought was genuinely pretty cool. That was the overall visual appeal of the movie. This was an interesting movie to look at. The design of this futuristic world was one that I would’ve liked to explore a little more. The use of color in this movie was something to complement, and the visual effects for the most part, while not Planet of the Apes level, were well done. That's my one compliment to this movie.
   One hot topic surrounding Ghost in the Shell is that of Hollywood Whitewashing. In the original film, the main character of Major is Japanese. As you might well have guessed, Scarlett Johansson is not Japanese. Their explanation for this was that the look of Major wasn’t inherently Japanese since she was basically a robot. However, in the film, a majority of the characters are Asian, and the future city they are in is in Japan, which made me really question why a Japanese actress wasn't cast. I understand from a business point of view that Johansson’s name will make the film a little more approachable to mainstream audiences, but I think that her casting ultimately ended up hurting the film, not helping it.
   Ghost in the Shell isn’t an actively awful movie such as Independence Day: Resurgence. This is an entirely different version of bad, more along the lines of Free State of Jones. This movie was a bore-fest from beginning to end. The performances throughout were really wooden and uninteresting, and the film never managed to do it’s one job. Be entertaining. Visually, it was cool to look at, but visuals only go so far. I would not recommend Ghost in the Shell, under basically any circumstance. Even for background noise, there are better things to watch.
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1.5/10

   So what did you think of the new Ghost in the Shell? How would you compare it to the original? Let me know by commenting on this post! Also, if you enjoyed this review, share it on Facebook and Twitter. It really helps! Don’t forget, I post every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, so check back then for more movie reviews and other miscellaneous movie thoughts!

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