#GHOST IN THE SHELL MOVIE#

“You’re what everyone will become one day.” Ouelet (Juliette Binoche), the scientist in charge of the program that birthed Mira. “Try to understand your importance,” pleads Dr.

In this new Ghost in the Shell, the Major is the first of her kind in an already robotically enhanced world, the first fully successful “cerebral salvage.' Her human brain was transplanted into a prosthetic body after what, she was told, was a terrible accident that would have killed her.

#GHOST IN THE SHELL MOVIE#

Johansson’s face is currently one of the most famous in the world, and while the movie occasionally deconstructs it and strips its panels off to expose the mechanical hardware underneath, it also takes care to have others praise its beauty.Īs the Major, who goes by Mira Killian in the latest version, Johansson is periodically reminded of how exceptional she is - not just in how she looks, but in her very being. She's designed to be formidable and attractive, but also to blend in.Īll of which lends an especially piquant irony to the casting of Scarlett Johansson in the role in Rupert Sanders’ splendid-looking but otherwise dreadful new live-action adaptation of the Masamune Shirow manga saga. She’s a cyborg with a state-of-the-art body and, these mirror images imply, an off-the-shelf face common enough that it gets recycled on mannequins and makes it possible to run into twinsies on the street, the high-tech equivalent of spotting someone wearing the same dress you are. It’s not just eerie symbolism - Major Motoko Kusanagi is literally seeing herself. The second is a dummy in a shop display, staring blankly outward. The first time, it’s a doppelgänger whom she makes eye contact with through a window, sitting in a café. There’s a wordless sequence in the middle of Mamoru Oshii’s animated 1995 Ghost in the Shell in which the movie’s main character travels through the city and glimpses her own face, twice, in the crowd.

Ghost in the shell