In 1995, Ghost in the Shell (GitS) – Mamoru Oshii’s adaptation of the manga – was released. Inspired heavily by Blade Runner (1982)’s bleak cyberpunk cities, it quickly earned its place as the next progenitor of modern sci-fi tropes, driving the genre’s obsession with AI vs humanity (its relevance today goes without saying), and was used in the Wachowskis’ pitch for The Matrix (1999).
In its opening minutes, Major Motoko Kusanagi, the film’s protagonist, wakes. She is reduced to a ghostly silhouette in front of a wide window – the city in view is pallid, yet wide awake in the morning sun. Our fully cybernetic protagonist sits on her bed – body hunched, heavy, and unhurried – the pause before the day begins.
Twenty-two years later, this familiar composition returns in Rupert Sanders’s 2017 live-action remake of the same name. Except, this time, Kusanagi is Major Mira Killian (played by A-lister Scarlett Johansson). She wakes in a sterile maintenance room, her surroundings the same dreary grey as the city outside. Wires are conspicuously attached to her neck, and her posture is unnaturally poised and choreographed, as if to emphasise her unhuman-ness.
These two shots are ostensibly similar: the positioning of the window, the Major, and the bed faithfully duplicated. Yet, the bleak expressiveness of the original, its stark lighting, meditative mood, and purpose are entirely lost in the remake. This shot is only symptomatic of a larger problem; the remake makes a concerted effort to replicate the husk of the original, namely the visuals and the general plot structure, but approaches the heart and intent of the story with an entirely different understanding. While its expansive CGI visuals and action sets are technically impressive, it is nearly unanimously regarded as a pale imitation of the original, both philosophically and stylistically.
The remake is no stranger to backlash for its cultural erasure: prior to release, it was criticised for its predominantly white cast and Scarlett Johansson’s casting as the originally Japanese Major. This erasure follows a pattern we often see in Hollywood remakes of Asian films – think Oldboy (2013). However, their Westernisation runs deeper than its exchange of ethnic authenticity for Hollywood star power, and is most profound when the clamour to make a profitable blockbuster leads to a fundamental misunderstanding of the source material’s cultural context, and in turn, a less-than-effective film. It is easy to simply ascribe it to the filmmakers’ incompetence, but that would be too flimsy. The question, then, is not only what elements got lost in the remake, but also why this will always be the case if we carelessly transplant Asian stories and approaches onto Western blockbuster blueprints.
The foundational Japanese philosophy of Ghost in the Shell (1995)
The 1995 GitS and its preceding manga series, though set in 2029, reflect the anxieties of 1990s Japan. It was a global powerhouse, seduced by the promises of rapid technological progress. Yet, it was unable to defend itself, forcibly disarmed and reliant on America for security under the Yoshida Doctrine – all in order to channel its resources into technology. What emerged was a newfound anxiety with technology, where a booming country began to drown in its own progress, losing its old ideals and sense of self to mimic the West.
Within this context, the 1995 GitS was conceived, channelling these anxieties into a future where Japan once again wrestles with its identity when overtaken by technology. Kusanagi, with a fully cybernetic body (the “shell”) and only a human brain (the “ghost”), embodies this anxiety at the beginning of her arc: What is identity if all parts of her body can be replaced and upgraded?
Kusanagi encounters the Puppet Master, our main antagonist, who has been “ghost hacking” the cyberbrains of cybernetic individuals, altering their memories and, in turn, their actions. At the beginning of her counter-cyberterrorism unit’s (Section 9) investigation into this individual, Kusanagi tracks a suspected garbage truck. There is a particularly poignant scene, where it is revealed to one of the garbage collectors in an interrogation that the Puppet Master had falsified his memories for him to do its bidding. He never had a wife or daughter in the first place. Kusanagi watches this interrogation unfold from behind the glass, facing a reflection of herself – a recurring visual motif for her character. If everything can be fabricated and imitated, was there ever truly a ghost in her?
This motif returns when Kusanagi sees a woman who looks identical to her – perhaps she was always just a synthetic reflection of another mass-produced “shell”. Kusanagi dives in her free time to feel vulnerable and human: “I feel…fear. Cold. Alone.” There is a beautiful sequence where she floats weightless back to the surface, staring at her reflection in the water surface – “…I imagine I’m becoming someone else.” – before she breaks through the surface, meeting her old self again. She is helplessly confined, conditionally human, “Only free to expand myself within boundaries.”
In the remake, the cultural context that made the 1995 GitS so profound and unique is reduced, its philosophical dilemma shoddily translated into a story of institutional rebellion, and the reclamation of a true, “human” self. Here, Kusanagi is Major Mira Killian, a cybernetic human whose human mind was placed into an artificial body by Hanka Robotics after her previous body was destroyed in a terrorist attack. Still a dedicated officer like the original, she experiences “glitches”, or fragments of memories of her past life that make her doubt her reality. She acts on her own initiative to talk to the Puppet Master, or Kuze, who reveals to her that Hanka had lied to her: she had in fact been a runaway teen, abducted and experimented on, and her true memories overridden. It’s a trite twist: Kuze is now our misunderstood antagonist, and Hanka a corporate-military complex of pure evil that violates bodily autonomy just to create new technology.
Kusanagi’s arc in the original is not as simply decipherable or linear; her initial dilemma, which revolves around a Western Turing-test logic, dissolves when the Puppet Master enters the story. A virtual programme that gained sentience through an accumulation of experience, assembled its own body, and escaped government control. It has no biological origin whatsoever, and yet undeniably possesses a ghost. No longer does she feel the need to prove the existence of her ghost; she instead asks, “What if a cyber brain could possibly generate its own ghost and create a soul all by itself? And if it did, just what would be the importance of being human then?”
The remake, however, doesn’t quite know what it tries to say. Its didactic mantra, “We cling to memories as if they define us. But what we do defines us,” is roughly approximate to the 1995 original (though tackily fed to us in her self-aggrandising hero’s monologue). Yet, Killian spends the majority of the runtime doing precisely the opposite – preoccupied with finding her lost memories, her mother, and herself in the process. She settles into a conventional, comprehensible self-recovery arc, tethering her ghost and meaning to her past. And even then, she is stripped of the conviction Kusanagi so steadfastly possesses, her existential doubt only a result of her victimhood at the hands of Hanka.
It is this turn in Kusanagi’s arc that I believe the remake fundamentally misunderstands. While Kusanagi lacks a “human” origin that Killian possesses, and both ask the same “Who am I?” question, the original story legitimises Kusanagi’s arc without ever needing to strictly prove that she is human enough. Many AI films like Blade Runner and A.I. Artificial Intelligence still feel the need to verify an AI’s humanity with signs of sentience, emotion, or a past, but GitS takes a radically different approach. The remake seems to stick to this AI trope, anxiously clinging to Killian’s origin as if to validate her humanity and meaning.
The reason these films’ messages diverge so starkly boils down to the philosophical and cultural differences underneath the Japanese original and Western remake. Western thinking about artificial consciousness has long been shaped by a demand for verification according to human standards – think Descartes’s "I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am" – such that the ghost, or soul, must prove its existence. Similarly, Western pop culture depictions of AI, such as The Terminator and I, Robot, regard them as fundamentally inferior to human exceptionality. Japanese philosophy, however, offers a different premise. In Shinto animism, reikon (a spirit/soul) dwells in everything, from nature to objects. Unlike Western philosophy, Shintoism does not strictly separate the “natural” and the “artificial”, and souls are not contingent on the condition of being human. The 1995 GitS follows a “techno-animist” philosophy, accepting technological beings as a part of nature, and naturally in possession of a soul (see this funeral ceremony for robot dogs and AI monk). It seems as though, without this cultural grounding, the remake fears that mainstream audiences wouldn’t understand a cybernetic protagonist whose humanity is treated as ultimately irrelevant.
It is this revelation that brings Kusanagi to the completion of her arc; her rejection of any stagnant ghost and an acceptance of a new form of being. The Puppet Master proposes to Kusanagi a merging of their two selves, casting aside the bonds of a physical body and “elevat[ing their] consciousness to a higher plane.” Kusanagi still clings to the concept of her ghost, asking for a guarantee that her sense of self would remain. The Puppet Master rejects this concept entirely: there is never a stagnant sense of self because “Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you.” It echoes the Buddhist idea of anattā – the idea that no permanent self exists. Their transcendence beyond a material attachment mirrors the concept of nirvana, the ultimate liberation from suffering.
Whether GitS is solely an allegory for Buddhism, as some argue, the final turn in Kusanagi’s arc is undeniably born out of Eastern religious philosophies– the discovery of meaning and a future beyond the self. Conversely, Mira Killian’s discovery of meaning is rooted in her reclamation of the distinct self, rejecting Kuze’s offer to merge (he was driven by a romantic connection in their past…?). By excising the original’s most pivotal plot point, the remake abandons any attempt to engage with the original’s philosophy. It instead falls back on familiar Western existential thought, celebrating individuality as the ultimate source of existential meaning.
While the original was founded on fundamentally different cultural ideas, the remake makes no effort to convey its message universally. As the 1995 GitS comes to a close, the camera pans up to reveal the vast expanse of New Port City – where the film takes place – dwarfing Kusanagi. Now, neither the Major nor the Puppet Master, she asks, “And where does the newborn go from here? The net is vast and infinite.” GitS proves to be a story concerned with the limitless possibilities that surpass human understanding, while its remake fears any exploration beyond the self and the past.
Diverging cultural approaches to cinema
Despite being a cyberpunk thriller, much of 1995’s GitS is spent in stillness and silence. In the 2017 remake, however, much of this restraint is replaced with spectacle. The two films’ cinematic language is vastly different – a product of their cultural approaches to the medium – and plays a big hand in defining how the philosophical ideas at the heart of the story end up being conveyed.
Somewhere in the middle of the 1995 GitS, there exists a three-and-a-half-minute montage; 34 shots dedicated solely to showcasing the world of New Port City, inspired by the grittily gentrified, rustic landscape of 1990s Hong Kong. In Japanese cinema, these pauses that break the tension of a film are a common technique among Japanese auteurs, and are what Hayao Miyazaki calls ma (間), or “pillow shots” in Ozu’s work. Ma is the Japanese concept, rooted in Zen, of negative space – a pause in time, momentary emptiness in space, or, for Miyazaki, “The time in between my clapping”. By allowing the film’s world to breathe away from the main storyline, it conveys the existential loneliness and desperation of a city losing its heart to modernisation.
The remake decides instead to translate these sequences into kitschy montages of drone shots, boasting the remarkable CGI that brought the world to life (though its world seems to resemble Blade Runner more than it does the original). The world in the 1995 GitS is not flaunted to the audience; it simply exists as a character, framed only from the perspective of humans on the ground. These differences extend to the films’ pacing in general: where the 1995 GitS gives the audience time for reflection amidst the action, the remake, much like other Hollywood blockbusters, seems to fear losing the audience’s engagement. Scott McCloud, in his book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1993), describes the difference in comic panel transitions in America and Japan by the latter’s emphasis on 'being there' rather than 'getting there', and I couldn’t explain it better.
Where the remake crowds its frame with action set pieces and cyberpunk CGI, the 1995 GitS frames its story with restraint; the lighting, composition, space, and characters speak for themselves. While the remake recreates some scenes nearly shot-for-shot, their beauty is lost within the noise most of the time, as seen in the introduction’s shot comparison. Where the 1995 GitS was still, the remake’s camera is restless, adding a frantic energy to the action sequences that is more jarring than engaging. Its background is undiscerningly crowded, yet still manages to be bland and grey, and annoyingly darkly lit for some reason.
During the interrogation of the garbage collector of the 1995 GitS, five shots are used to convey his story. The camera pushes in slowly, the fluorescent glare casting harsh shadows on his face as he learns all his memories have been fabricated. The camera allows his expression alone to convey his devastation so tenderly. The remake takes a radically different approach: it is devoid of the quiet desperation of the original, opting instead for awkwardly timed cuts and a camera that rotates around a glass container, effectively erecting an emotional barrier between the audience and the character. While anger can be a potent way to convey helplessness, the remake’s decision to transform a scene of restrained dialogue into a clichéd villainous interrogation sacrifices the haunting tragedy of his story.
The understated characterisation of the 1995 GitS reflects a culture that values emotional restraint and gaman (stoicism) in social conduct, serving a film that values philosophical doubt over platitudes. While its philosophical ideas are still conveyed through expository dialogue, Kusanagi’s emotional interiority is communicated not by declaration but by contextual cues, and a silent shot held that trusts the animators.
The Hollywood instinct to prioritise spectacle and legibility is not wrong, and is understandably shaped by audience demographics. For the 1995 GitS, however, restraint is a pivotal stylistic choice, shaped by cultural approaches to cinema, that bears the load of the story’s quiet devastation and existentialism. When the remake steals the likeness of its predecessor, while filling the stillness and emptiness, it loses the meaning that only accumulates when we trust the frame to speak for itself.
Conclusion
The remake’s decision in adopting Hollywood blockbuster tendencies to serve a mainstream audience isn’t a sin; taken alone, it is a perfectly serviceable blockbuster. Remakes don’t require absolute compliance to the source material – films like The Departed (2006) and The Magnificent Seven (1960) are celebrated for successfully translating Asian narratives into Western contexts while still honouring the essence of the originals. Instead, the remake of GitS masquerades as a faithful remake, yet mines it for parts that can serve its Westernised approach, overriding the fundamentally Japanese style and story of the original that made it so powerful.
Hollywood will never stop remaking successful non-Western films. These remakes, however, don’t need to exist as hollow, cash-grabbing imitations of their originals – with proper care and respect, they can layer the original with new perspectives and introduce foreign films to mainstream Western audiences. Remakes, after all, are testaments to the timeless and universal stories of our humanity.
Bibliography
Film stills courtesy of:
1995 Original: Kodansha, Bandai Visual, & Manga Entertainment.
2017 Remake: Paramount Pictures & DreamWorks Pictures.
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