Day 327: Wednesday Reviews - Ghost in the Shell (1995)

Picture it. You’re nineteen. You’re starting university soon, but for a few weeks beforehand you exist in a liminal state, not the person you were, not yet the person you will shortly become. You drift to your own rhythms: sleeping late, reading and playing videogames, skateboarding… then staying up half the night watching films, drinking whisky... the midnight hours, in your quiet house with the rest of your family in bed, belonging to only you.

It was in this zone between borders, outside of regular time, that I first watched Ghost in the Shell. I think it was the late movie on Film Four. I don’t remember if I’d noticed it in the Radio Times that week and settled in on purpose, or just changed channel to it accidentally.

I do remember how otherworldly and alien and strange it felt. A missive from another land, one of desaturated tones, rainslicked Tokyo rooftoops, alleyways submerged in shadow, starlight glinting off glass canyons stretching way out ahead into forever. I was anxious about a lot of things in those weeks - whether I’d chosen the right uni, the right course, whether I would make friends, how bad my acne was going to be come moving day - but over 80 minutes on that night, with the whisky softening the sharp edges of my mind and Ghost in the Shell splashing its light from our old TV set across the room’s dark walls, I was completely transported.

It is a good film for teenagers, I think, for people in their early twenties; a cult sci-fi anime based on Masamune Shirow’s manga about a cyberpunk near-future where the technological and the organic blend in ever-increasing ways, and questions of sentience and existence and the nature of the soul arise anew.

It isn’t hugely original in setting, theme, or plot, but it does cover well-trodden tropes with elan and a verve. It is a lonely film, melancholic and contemplative, with long stretches of dialogue-free shots soaking in the cityscapes, allowing the sense of isolation and yugen engendered by the tone to percolate, to ripple. A neo-noir Tarkovsky, then, with balletic assassins and automatic weapons.

Its story concerns Major Motoko Kusanagi, a cyborg in a synthetic shell, with still the ghost of a soul, whether transferred or simulated (the film is coy with backstory) flitting around inside her. Major works for Section 9, a counter-terrorism unit in the Japan of 2029, and is often sent to do the off-books dirty work in which the government cannot be seen to officially engage.

Through the events of the plot Major and Section 9 become embroiled in the hunt for a criminal known as the Puppet Master, an elusive entity who hacks into human beings and forces them, without their knowledge, to do his bidding. An early scene shows a petty hoodlum being informed he was being controlled by this Puppet Master, that his motivating memories of family were implanted, and the tone is forlorn, cold, sad. But as the plot develops we learn that the Puppet Master might not be what he seems, and there are other forces hidden in the background pulling the strings.

It’s a plot that is at times obfuscated and difficult to follow, and despite its familiarity often front-loads information and rushes through beats in rapid snatches of expository dialogue. But we’re not really here for the plot. Ghost in the Shell is more a rumination on what distinguishes the living from the nonliving, and the mysteries of existence.

Major is a great character, elusive, enigmatic, tenebrous, yet relatable. She does not know what she is, but she knows that she is. What would have been a tiresome femme fatale robot assassin cliche in lesser sci-fi here is (slightly) more intriguing, more esoteric. It’s not high art, but it is good mainstream art.

The animation is also worthy of praise. It is sumptuous, and very well observed. It captures subtleties of movement and motion, it feels right, and a large part of the joy of the film is simply appreciating the way a body spins as it drops from a rooftop, the way bullets pepper and chew masonry, the way hair lifts and cascades in the heat of a blow-dryer. In its world of technological advancement and dehumanising isolation, the vivid animation helps ground the piece, gives it its humanity. The shell is cold metal, but the ghost inside is warm and flowing.

The world building is also solid, with the sense of much continuing beyond the narrative’s limited scope. Characters and organisations and nations are skirted over without much screen-time, but there is the sense of their internal existence even when they are only treated to an off-hand reference. There is, however, some of the feel of a feature-length television episode to proceedings - one adventure in an ongoing series, rather than a discrete work standing by itself.

If you’re expecting Major’s origin story you’ll be disappointed, and nothing is tied up, no hero’s journey cycle is fully completed. There isn’t even, in fact, much in the way of character arcs. An awful lot changes in its world in the last few minutes, but we’re not given the opportunity to explore this, and the ending feels rushed, abrupt.

The pacing is also a little off, the structure wonky. Two opening action sequences fan out into scenes of meditative introspection, what feels narratively like the end of the first act actually comes two-thirds into the run-time, then what would be acts two and three are squashed together at the tail-end.

So it’s not a masterpiece, and watching it now it is perhaps sophomoric, grounded in genre, derivative in theme. Yet it is an iconic work of cinema, one of the glistening lights of 90s anime, and I can still feel hints of what I felt when I first watched it, nineteen years old, utterly awed and enraptured by its weirdness, by those lugubrious neon streets, by that inscrutable cyborg figure shimmering in her optical camouflage as she fell through the air.

Forget the execrable live-action remake, this 1995 original is where it's at.