The Ghost in the Shell Live Action Trailer is out. You can watch it here. I am not posting it on my blog, because personally I do not want that train-wreck anywhere near me. I watched it and that was enough to make me throw up a little in my mouth.
Now that the trailer is out, we know that the movie still takes place in “Japan” (or more specifically, as fans will know, New Port City). Which begs the question, why would the Japanese Government be manufacturing and using white cyborg bodies as opposed to Japanese ones? Also, why does no one in this trailer ever speak Japanese? Ah but of course we must suspend our disbelief to once again accept that white people can play around and have important roles anywhere in the world. There are no boundaries for white people. They can be anything they want to be.
Look. There’s no other way to phrase this. The movie is hollow. The setting, the characters, everything feels like the production team took the surface-level details of GitS and played around with it to their liking. The setting is a bland, superficial, and fetishized portrayal of Japan. Scarlett Johansson roams and stand around with confused, zoned-out faces, that screams ‘where am I? who am I?’ like she’s on a journey of self-discovery.
Actually wait, scratch that. It’s not like she’s on a journey of self-discovery. She is on a journey of self-discovery; it’s clear from the trailer that the main plotline is Kusanagi Motoko – no wait I’m sorry, THE MAJOR, learning more about where she came from and how she was created. Which is fair enough, since that has always been something explored in the GitS franchise – but it feels incredibly artificial and uninspiring when you remember that Scarlet Johannson has played this role multiple times. In Lost in Translation she’s a woman who’s trying to find her direction in life by experiencing Tokyo’s nightlife, in Lucy she’s a genetically enhanced woman running around Taiwan. GitS is basically part 3 in this trilogy (and one can only hope that this is a trilogy and not a fucking quintet) where this time, ScarJo is a cyborg in Japan. It’s a white woman finding herself in a ~foreign, exotic, asian~ environment.
Now some will say that I am overreacting and that this is just typecasting. Yes, it is typecasting, but when this typecasting often results in a hackneyed, superficial depiction of East Asia, its cultures, and its peoples, I have the right to criticize it and call it what it is – racist.
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