Ghost in the Shell (2017)
(I originally wrote this back in 2017 on my tumblr blog, and am posting it again here, with some edits, because I watched ten minutes of GitS2017 last night and I found myself yelling the same frustrations I had at the time at the screen again) Ghost in the Shell 2017 is a patchwork of ransacked imagery used to tell yet another story where Scarlett Johansen gets used by the powers that be. Understand that I’m not just talking about the stuff it lifts from the 1995 anime, the 2004 sequel, Ghost in the Shell: Innocence , or even the stuff it takes from the second series of Stand Alone Complex (SAC) and GitS: Arise , although that is certainly present. The imagery it co-opts is broader, taking a story that is deeply, fundamentally about the rise of Japan as a consumer electronics superpower, about the modernisation and global identity of East Asia. It twists the core philosophy at the heart of Ghost in the Shell , a story about connectedness, society and finding one’s identity withi