Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell is absorbing, melancholy science fiction, with a city more vivid than several of its people. The plotting can be needlessly opaque, but the images make its questions about identity worth the work.
Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell is absorbing science fiction whose questions about being human deserve the attention its plotting demands. It considers what happens when organic and mechanical life become difficult to tell apart, putting the question inside a violent thriller. At 83 minutes, it has little interest in easing us into the subject, and some of its explanations make matters harder. We recommend it for the patient viewer: the animated city gives Oshii’s ideas a convincing setting long before the dialogue finishes spelling them out.
Hisao Shirai’s cinematography makes the crowded cityscapes readable without making them tidy. Buildings and cyberspace interfaces demand attention because they seem to belong to a place with more going on than the story can contain. The amount of detail matters: technology has become ordinary here, something to live among rather than stop and admire. We felt unexpectedly lonely looking at this city. The sheer density of the surroundings makes the characters seem isolated, and that feeling brings the film’s questions about identity closer than the dialogue often manages.
Shuichi Kakesu’s editing allows the images to linger, resisting the demand to hurry back to the action. That patience pays off because we need time to look, not merely register another elaborate background. Kenji Kawai’s music contributes to the melancholy rather than trying to make every moment exciting. It helps sustain an uneasy mood even when we are not keeping up with every implication of the story. These stretches are absorbing enough that the brief running time never feels like a restriction.
Oshii also keeps returning to exposed bodies, putting flesh beside the mechanical elements that complicate our response to it. There is an obvious risk of turning the question into an excuse for undressing an animated woman. The film does not entirely escape that discomfort, and we would not want to pretend that it does. Yet the repeated stripping makes physical appearance an unreliable guide to who someone is, which gives the nudity a reason to be here beyond decoration.
The difficulty is Kazunori Ito’s screenplay, which sometimes makes its people sound as though they have been brought in to clarify the reading. Explanations arrive heavily, while the plotting can still be hard to follow. We do not need every uncertainty resolved, but occasionally the effort of following events gets in the way of considering their meaning. The characters also have too little life beyond the questions they raise. Atsuko Tanaka’s restraint as the voice of Motoko Kusanagi suits the film’s coolness, although it cannot entirely overcome that distance.
There is something welcome in a science-fiction film that does not treat technological change simply as a threat to be defeated. Oshii is interested in what humanity might become, and lets that possibility remain unsettling without insisting that it must be dreadful. The violent action keeps this from becoming a lecture for long, and its precision supplies some pleasure that needs no explanation. We would accept a little more warmth, but the willingness to take an unfamiliar idea seriously is reason enough to stay. Give it an evening when nobody needs cheering up.
