Before the release of the new live action adaptation of Ghost in the Shell, Mamoru Oshii, director of the original animated Japanese version, gave his blessing to director Rupert Sanders’s controversial decision to cast Scarlett Johansson as the protagonist of the film, Major: an operative for the military police force Section 9 with a robotic body and a human mind in search of the secrets of her past. In response to allegations of whitewashing that have haunted the film ever since that decision, Oshii wrote: “I can only sense a political motive from the people opposing it, and I believe artistic expression must be free from politics.”

However, artistic expression cannot be free from politics, or at least from political implications, and this is a film whose racial politics turns out to be pretty indefensible. Major, the film tells us, represents “the best of robotics and the best of humanity”. But because of the casting, her synthetic body is a white one, whereas in animated versions of the source material her race could be left ambiguous. The (probably unintended, but undeniably sinister) implication, then, is that the ‘best’ marriage of humanity and cybernetics results in a body resembling a white woman. This kind of implication cannot easily be excused by seeking refuge in the autonomy of art; after all, it was the decision of the director to have a white woman play this character.

“However, artistic expression cannot be free from politics, or at least from political implications, and this is a film whose racial politics turns out to be pretty indefensible”

On paper Johansson would seem perhaps the best choice for the part if the director and producers were intent on casting a white actress, given her experience both in action films (The Avengers), and more cerebral science fiction films (Under the Skin, Her). However, her performance here is ultimately rather lacklustre; she attempts a stoic monotone for much of the film – one can almost imagine Sanders urging her to be ‘more robotic’ – but a lot of the time she comes across as bored, and occasionally actually embarrassed at the lines she’s made to deliver. Compared to her expressive vocal performance in Her, it’s hard not to be a little disappointed in her work here. There are, however, some impressive moments, such as the uncanny way in which she gasps for breath when she awakens in her new robotic body at the start of the film.

Similarly, the film’s very talented supporting actors are mostly wasted on roles that are at best undeveloped and two-dimensional, and, at worst, border on the lazily stereotypical. Many of the lines sound as if they were written as placeholder dialogue, giving the bare minimum of information that the viewer might need, the screenwriters apparently having forgotten to update them with something less functional and more nuanced. It is perhaps unsurprising that Pilou Asbæk “didn’t have any idea what to do with [his] character” on the basis of the script alone, having to look to the original manga for inspiration. Meanwhile, Juliette Binoche plays a morally compromised scientist with a predictably redemptive character arc, and Takeshi Kitano plays Major’s wise, elderly-but-deadly commanding officer, whose lines consist mainly of proverbs(!) The more stereotypical aspects of this latter character’s portrayal are made all the more glaring by the fact that Kitano is the only Japanese actor in the film’s core cast; the vast majority of the characters who appear in more than two scenes are white.

The film’s whitewashing problem is serious, and should not be ignored; it represents a particularly acute instance of an industry-wide problem that Hollywood as a whole is doing little to remedy. Nonetheless, the film should perhaps not be dismissed wholesale on the basis of its casting, especially since in some areas the political implications of the film are much more progressive. For instance, Major is thought of as a woman by the film’s characters, and referred to with feminine pronouns, though her body isn’t biologically female. The film is thus implicitly trans positive in its implied dissolution of any identification between biological sex and gender; its imagined technologies make such a distinction unviable, and vividly suggest that it could have no basis in our society, either. However, here and elsewhere the film is strangely unwilling to explicitly confront and engage with its themes in any particularly meaningful way. Rather, it seems constantly eager to move swiftly on to the next banal action sequence.

“The film is implicitly trans positive in its implied dissolution of any identification between biological sex and gender; its imagined technologies make such a distinction unviable, and vividly suggest that it could have no basis in our society”

Nonetheless, the film does raise some interesting points, albeit clumsily. The term that the film uses to refer to whatever it is that underlies a person’s identity, ‘ghost,’ is a suggestive one, because carrying not only connotations of immateriality (as ‘soul’ would), but also of haunting. The term gains in significance in this new adaptation, which places a greater emphasis on memory than Oshii’s version. Major is haunted by ‘glitches’, which turn out to be memories from her life in a previous body, forcing their way into consciousness despite her handlers’ best efforts to suppress them. The film ultimately locates personal identity and survival in the continuity of our memory, so the choice of the term ‘ghost’ is an apt one; both ghosts and memories are manifestations of the past that must be dealt with in the present. This thematic point is unfortunately obscured by the film’s closing narration, however, where Major repeats an earlier piece of dialogue that states that “we are defined not by our memories, but by our actions” – a slogan that bears little relation to the action of the plot and the repercussions it has for our understanding of ourselves.

Where the film really shines is in its visuals, and many of the shots are striking and unnerving – Major’s synthetic skin floating like feathers in the opening credits, her solitary form reflected in a puddle below immense white housing blocks. The most visually arresting scenes of Oshii’s original adaptation are recreated in stunning CGI, albeit in less interesting narrative contexts. The production design is also excellent, and the cybernetic elements of many character designs are often eerie and disarming, especially in their interaction with human bodies. There is something deeply unnerving about seeing Johansson in close-up, speaking calmly, only for the camera to pan down and reveal that a gaping hole in her torso is being slowly sewn up (though I do say this as someone who is exceptionally squeamish).

The Long Review: Does ‘Free Fire’ hit its target?

But Sanders seems more interested in showing us repetitive and uninspired slow motion fight scenes than in exploring the more disturbing elements of the film’s visual world, and even his best images are ones we’ve seen before in other, better films: one is constantly reminded not only of Oshii’s versions of these scenes, but of the brooding neon cityscapes of Blade Runner; of the bleached apartment buildings of Spielberg’s Minority Report; and of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy. Furthermore, the product placement in the film is at times downright distracting. A giant floating neon Adidas logo hovering over the city is perhaps forgivable for its potentially subversive symbolic force, but seeing the Honda logo in the corner of the screen every time Major gets on her motorcycle is more than a little jarring.

The attempt to transmute overtly philosophical source material into a Hollywood sci-fi action movie was a bold decision, but the resulting film ultimately sacrifices its most interesting elements in a bid for mainstream appeal. In spite of itself, Ghost in the Shell does raise interesting questions, but you’d be better off watching Oshii’s more pensive adaptation, or Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner; both are visually stunning films that do a much better job of exploring the issues Sanders’s film uses as mere window dressing. Perhaps the next time Hollywood attempts something similar, it will do so more thoughtfully, both in its casting and its scripting