Date: Thursday 6 April 2017
Distributor: Paramount Pictures Australia
Format: Digital Projection, English dialogue with some Japanese dialogue and English subtitles
Length: 106 minutes
Production Date: 2017
Currently on Home Video (as of writing): No
Ignoring everything written about it, I decided to go watch this film on the second last day of my annual leave. Thinking it would be cheaper before 4pm (it wasn’t) and wanting to park for free (as well as wanting to do a few other things on that side of town) I traveled all the way over to Belconnen. Gawd, there are some dodgy looking people in that area now. It didn’t seem that that way when I first lived there back in the mid 1990’s. The township’s demographic has also substantially changed in the last decade or so. There are a lot of Chinese immigrants here now. Not sure why they have congregated here and not spread out more over the city, which is interesting.
The other thing which surprised me was the metamorphosis that Hoyts has undertaken. It’s fucking awful and soulless. There’s a Ben & Jerry’s in one corner and a whole heap of things in your way from the box office to the cinemas just to make you buy shit. This must have been a recent change as workers were seemingly putting the finishing touches to various areas of the interior. The cinemas themselves had changed too, with the one I was in being all reclining seats. This made it rather difficult to sit up straight, but at least they were comfortable. Around 25 people showed up for a 1pm screening on a weekday which did surprise me. And despite the whole “whitewashing controversy” the vast majority of cinema goers were Chinese or Korean. Obviously they weren’t perturbed by the lack of an Asian lead in the film, unlike everyone else making noise about it (i.e. mostly “white people”).
Unfortunately some of the patrons in front of me decided to play with the phones on and off during the entire film. There’s nothing worse than trying to concentrate on a film and seeing the light of a mobile phone flicker on and off in the corner of your vision. This shitty little group also decided to talk on and off during the film, just barely audible enough to be distracting. Hey kids, how about watching the film or fucking off? I felt like slapping them and hurling their phones across the cinema. The audience also had to endure 25 minutes worth of adverts and film trailers for nothing but truly terrible Hollywood sequels and remakes. Why do we need a big screen remake of “Baywatch” with really bad jokes and lame dialogue?
Anyway, on to the movie; set sometime in a future Hong Kong, the city now looks like a hyperreal version of Los Angeles in “Blade Runner”. A young woman named Mira Killian (played by Scarlett Johansson) has survived a terrorist attack and is taken in by the robotics division of multinational corporation Hanka. She awakens and is told by her physician, Dr Ouelet (Juliette Binoche, Julie Vignon de Courcy in the “Three Colours” film trilogy), that her body had been virtually destroyed and that her brain has been transferred into that of a very human-like cyborg body. Against the objections of Ouelet, Hanka CEO, Cutter (Peter Ferdinando), orders Killian to be transferred to Section 9, an outsourced government counter-terrorism group run by Hanka.
A year on and Killian has earned the rank of major in Section 9 and functions as the group’s leader. Section 9 is headed up by Daisuke Aramaki (Takeshi Kitano) who essentially gives the group orders, sometimes handed down directly from Cutter. While the team is made up of several specialised members, Major Killian has very close ties to one of her underlings, Batou (Pilou Asbæk, best known for his portrayal as Euron Greyjoy in “Game of Thrones”). Batou is quite protective of her. Section 9 is given the task of rescuing delegates at Hanka business dinner as the hacked Geisha android hosts take the delegates hostage. After rescuing the delegates and destroying one of the Geishas, Killian begins to wonder if she is really a robot and not a human. Batou assures her she is human. Later Killian begins seeing strange visions and is concerned that she cannot remember her past. Dr Ouelet dismisses her concerns as glitches in her software. Section 9 soon discover the culprit behind the Geisha attack was someone known as Kuze. Killian decides to dive into the remaining Geisha robot’s brain in order to obtain more information. Though it is a risky move, Killian discovers that the Geisha is linked to a seedy nightclub. Killian and Batou infiltrate the club but soon discover the culprit has trapped them. Both fight off their attackers and explore the rooms behind the club’s façade, only to find a booby trap in the form of a massive bomb. The resulting explosion severely injuries Killian and destroys Batou’s eyes which he replaces with cyborg versions.
Kuze’s next move is to hack into sanitation workers and make them kill Section 9's consultant, Dr Dahlin (Anamaria Marinca, Dita in “The Politician's Husband”). With the deaths of several Hanka researchers and scientists, Section 9 realise that Dr Ouelet is next in line to be assassinated. Using one of the sanitation workers captured by Section 9, Kuse hacks his vocal cords and briefly taunts Section 9 before compelling the sanitation working to commit suicide. However Section 9 manage to track the location of Kuze’s hack before his death. There they find nearly a hundred people mentally linked together as a makeshift signal network for Kuze. Kuse uses his underlings to capture Killian where he tells her that the scientists at Hanka stole her memories and identity. Kuze then frees her and makes his escape. Later Killian confronts Dr Ouelet who confirms Killian’s worst fears. Cutter decides that Killian is too much of a risk and orders Section 9 to exterminate her.
Let’s put the elephant in the room to bed for once and all; outside of western anime fandom and western media, no one really gives a flying fuck about the supposed “whitewashing” in this film. It’s a commercial product (with a budget of the size of the GDP of a small African nation) from a large Hollywood movie studio, hence the reason why they got a bankable star as the lead. Go name an Asian female lead that the public knows, just one. Most of the complaints about this are from people who aren’t fans of the franchise or really don’t understand it. Masumune Shirow himself said that Major Motoko Kusanagi is to a certain degree stateless and chose a body that was generic to avoid her parts being harvested. I have also read that Shirow stated that Kusanagi chose a Caucasian body, however I can find no evidence whatsoever that he actually said this.
Overall the cast is quite diverse with Takeshi Kitano, Pilou Asbæk, Juliette Binoche, Chin Han (as Togusa) and Danusia Samal (as Section 9’s weapons specialist Ladriya), so to say the film whitewashes the characters totally misses the forest for the trees. Focusing on Scarlett Johansson and not the rest of the film misrepresents it as whole. Killian’s origins are exposed later in the film and it totally fits in with the promotional material in regards to her past and memories being stolen. Another recent article I’ve read interviews several Japanese American actresses (none who were born in or lived in Japan as far as I’m aware) who criticise the casting, the “twist ending” and how a Japanese woman in the film expressed herself. Again I think this is rather myopic and doesn’t view the film as a whole or understand that this film is made for a worldwide audience, not a Japanese one or one that was quite familiar with Japanese traits and social behaviour (and let's be honest, a lot of these are completely alien to those outside Japan).
One of the key themes in this film is loss of identity. It is rather amusing that most of the critics of the film failed to pick this up. I note again that the audience I saw the film with where almost entirely Chinese origin with some Koreans and very few westerners. They obviously had no problem paying to watch this film. The Japanese media also don’t give a crap about the whole “whitewashing controversy”. They vast majority of people making noise about it are Americans who are absolutely obsessed with race in entertainment, rather than actually being concerned about the content and themes presented in that media. I do love to see casting against type as it makes cinema far more interesting. However I personally I don’t give a shit about demographics or ticking ethnic, disabled or gender boxes, especially when it's at the detriment of the story being told. Just give me an entertaining film and screw the annoying and frustrating politics.
Admittedly due to the negativity surrounding this film, I had set a pretty low bar for it. However it passed that bar with flying colours. I was initially rather taken aback by the futuristic setting of Hong Kong which looked a lot like the Los Angeles of 2019 in “Blade Runner” on steroids. It looked garish and absurd but as the film progressed it made sense to me and seemed a plausible view of what the future may look like, especially for those with augmented brains. The film replicates scenes and concepts mostly from the first anime film as well as taking bits and pieces from “Innocence (Ghost in the Shell 2)”, “Stand Alone Complex” and the manga. Unlike the “Arise” film series which also reused and reinterpreted sequences from the manga and previous anime adaptations, here it feels rather fresh and different. In “Arise” it just felt uninspired. The film also does seem to understand the messages and themes of the original manga and anime adaptations such as identity, hackers implanting false memories and forcing people to commit crimes against their will etc. I really liked how several ideas from all versions of the anime were mashed up to create new concepts for this film. Kuze for example is taken from “Stand Alone Complex 2nd Gig”, but infuses the same ideas from Puppet Master and Project 2501 from the manga and first anime film.
Scarlett Johansson portrays Major Mira Killian as someone who is tough on the outside, but also quite vulnerable as she searches for her true identity. One of the more interesting sequences is where Killian hires a sex worker and then proceeds to caress her face ask if she really human. It really portrayed Killian as woman confused about her identity and not feeling human within her cyborg shell. I thought this was a rather intriguing take on the major we are all familiar with. Pilou Asbæk also does a great interpretation of Batou. It’s patently obvious he has great affection for Killian and Asbæk’s performance expresses that brilliantly and effortlessly.
While most of the film looked gorgeous, some of the design aspects didn’t work for me. The obvious one is Killian’s flesh coloured battle suit which looks a bit silly. The other thing which I was surprised about that the optic camouflage systems used to great effect in the anime adaptations were underutilised in this film. While most of the acting in this film was pretty good, Takeshi Kitano’s Daisuke Aramaki shat me. Essentially he just growled his lines in Japanese and sat about. When he did leap into action he hobbled about like an old man. I really don’t understand why they chose him for this film. Why not Ken Watanabe or some other Japanese actor who has more range and doesn’t look like they’ve had a stroke? Of course the most baffling thing is why all of Kitano’s dialogue is in Japanese and everyone else’s is in English? You could put that down to everyone having augmented brains and being able to translate it instantaneously, but for example, why don’t we hear anyone speak Cantonese since its set in Hong Kong?
Overall I quite liked this film. Though this is only the second film Rupert Sanders has directed (“Snow White and the Huntsman” was his first, he was previously a director for high end commercials), it looks fantastic. As I said before he seems to understand the concepts behind the franchise and injects new material such as Killian’s confusion between her cyborg body and human mind, her search for original identity and interestingly the outsourcing of government tasks to the private sector (in Hanka’s handling of Section 9) and the conflicts, overreach and corruption that can cause. What impressed me is that even though the material was based on something I was quite familiar with (and lifted almost shot for shot from some sections of the first anime film), it did feel rather fresh and new. Despite a few problems I have with the film, this is easily one of the better if not the best Hollywood adaption of anime and/or manga material so far. Admittedly that’s not a high bar to jump. I think it’s a such a shame that the stupid “whitewashing controversy” has just about drowned out anything positive people have to say about the film. It’s already set to make a loss of $60 million. I am going to give this film a solid 7 out of 10. I was going to give it .5 more, but on balance a 7 is more than fair.
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