Ghost in the Shell ... meh.

I finally caught Ghost in the Shell at our local theater. It's *shrug*. It's got an amazingly pretty design and visuals — the props and world is stunning, which pleased me, because I was pretty much prepared to enjoy this film as eye candy. The story was run of the mill action / betrayal thriller. Scarlett Johansson was fine.

I've never seen the original anime, so I don't have a baseline to compare the story against. It's basic. Heroine is enhanced to carry out mission, discovers that she's been snatched away due to nefarious super-corporation, turns on them and gets revenge. No surprises there. It's an accessible film that I enjoyed for the most part.

The two things that bothered me about this, though. The film felt like it should have been so much more interesting, visually. Not the design, but the actual camera work. Anime has had a really neat influence on film: just look at what The Matrix did. Animation can do so much more than live action because of its medium, and extensive CGI now frees up live action film to do so much more.  I was hoping that the film would do more than just dramatic slow motions, and that the action scenes would be a bit more dramatic or interesting to watch. That it was sort of dull to watch is a crime in and of itself. I guess that's what you get when you put the guy who directed Snow White and the Huntsman behind the camera.

Secondly, the whitewashing thing? I think that if they hadn't explicitly made it a plot point, it probably would have been okay. It would still be a problem — hiring a caucasian actress for the role should have been thought out a bit more. That it was a point integrated into the story itself made it feel as though they realized it would be a problem, and didn't actually do the one thing they could have done to fix it. Given how the movie has been bombing, it's pretty clear they overestimated Johansson's star power and underestimated the negative press they got. At least they have an easy out if this ever gets a sequel: just recast Johansson by saying that she gets a new body.

It's interesting to see just how this has been playing out, especially so soon after Marvel's Netflix show Iron Fist rightly earned wide-spread criticism for exactly the same reasons. They underestimated the flurry of negativity that the show earned, but also put together an incredibly dull show. For a story about martial arts, it should have outdone Daredevil by a country mile.

Hopefully, studios will actually pay a bit more attention to this sort of thing moving forward. At least they're owning up to the problems this time.