5 Reasons Ghost In The Shell Won't Live Up To Fan Expectations
1. It's Going To Be An Action Film
*Sigh*
The movie is being pitched as a Sci-Fi Action film, something that couldn't be further from the truth when it came to the original series and film.
Ghost In The Shell is primarily a philosophical feature, focusing enormously on the ideas of existentialism and societies pre-conceptions toward the mind and the body. The very title is a homage to Arthur Koestler's book published in 1967 entitled The Ghost In The Machine, which explores the ideas presented by Gilbert Kyle on René Descartes work on mind-body dualism.
Shirow took inspiration from the book and used some of it's ideas to create the inner workings of the Major's mind, who is constantly pre-occupied with her own existence, having been made into a full cyborg at a young age and losing all of her memory, beckoning the question; what exactly makes us human? The Major refers to her Ghost on several occasions in the film, suggesting she sees it as something like the presence of a soul in her mechanical body.
This concept is critical to understanding the original film, and fears that this could be disappointingly missed from the live action remake could be well founded.
Hopefully, all those involved will understand the importance of allowing some breath taking action scenes to take place, but also the subtlety that is key in recreating one of the most thought provoking and aesthetically inspiring movies of the 20th Century.