Scarlett Johansson Thinks She Might Run For Office Someday

If you’re anxious you may forget the name of the movie you’re watching, the writers have been kind enough to use the words “ghost” and “shell” about 300 times a piece throughout the script. Trying to make a global blockbuster out of a legendary Japanese manga is no easy feat (Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks has had the USA rights since 2008), not to mention the 1995 animated movie that’s considered a classic. Or that the Major’s psychic tussle to recover the truth of her life before she became a hard-bodied, crime-fighting, walking weapon is just another version of Murphy’s struggle in RoboCop. After a terrorist attack left Major’s parents dead and broke her body beyond fix, she’s chosen for an experimental counter-terrorism program funded by the all-powerful Hanka Corp., in which her brain is lifted into a virtually un-killable cyborg body.

In her interview Wednesday, Johansson said she would continue to support left-wing organizations like Planned Parenthood even if it causes some people to stay away from her films.

Rupert Sanders’ remake of Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 influential anime classic, from Masamune Shirow’s Japanese manga comics, is a dazzling dystopia. Johansson’s casting is the latest in a long line of whitewashing controversies (see related story), but one could credibly argue that – because her character is a synthetic shell transcending humanity and therefore race – it’s not really whitewashing.

The striking look is matched by a plot that is just as murky and ponderous as its source material, with a greater focus on the kind of origin-revealing conspiracy that modern Hollywood action movies obsess over.

Section 9 faces a new threat in the shape of Kuze (Michael Pitt), who’s out to take down Hanka Robotics. Employed by intelligence department Section 9, she and her charismatic, softhearted partner Batou (Pilou Asbæk) fight cyber terrorism in a sprawling, futuristic metropolis. Once the initial awe is lost however, it doesn’t have much to fall back on, and the once-impressive features suddenly seem less so.

What it does give us is a visual feast adhering to the vision that the future isn’t all clean and shiny but a bit of a kip. If Major is Asian, why not cast the part with an Asian actress?

Major’s brain-in-a-robot existence is only the most extreme example of future tech gone wild.

There’s an obvious economic motivation behind Johansson’s casting. When a terrorist starts hacking into people’s memory she is best placed to track the perpetrator down. Paramount is looking at dollars over common sense.

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And it also points out a big, gaping hole in Hollywood’s diversity problem. After all, the main character Major (played by Scarlett Johansson) is basically a human brain connected to a robotic body, so you’d think the movie would find time to explore how much of Major’s human self survives without her old body, or how much free will she retains despite being literally programmed by her corporate masters.

The thing is that this argument – and the larger, behind-the-screen discussion about how Asians and Asian-Americans are portrayed, or perhaps more accurately not portrayed, in American media – is far more interesting than most of what’s on the screen in “Ghost in the Shell”.