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davidehrlich2.5

well… those were definitely some choices.

SilentDawn

5Leaving the theater last night, having just sat through the excruciating experience of Ghost in the Shelll, I was furious. I wasn't merely furious at the misconstrued world-building, all imitation and no flair, all dazzling 1990s sci-fi dress-up and no semblance of imagination. I wasn't simply furious at the tattered remnants of a screenplay and its constant tendency of oversimplification in regards to its existentialism and its gender ambiguity. I wasn’t *only* furious at the incoherent action, cut together with no respect for spatial continuity yet stable in every frame, somehow fucking up staging in large interior environments. It's all a hair-pulling catastrophe, no doubt, but it's nothing in comparison to the thought that pundits and fans shared their wrathful voices in regards to Scarlett Johansson's casting and the big wimpy conglomerate did nothing to empathize with such complaints, instead infusing the idea of diversity into its structure as the final revelation, choosing to apologize by appropriating not only the base culture of the protagonist but also their very own pre-production controversy into their remake hodgepodge as an emotional grace note! Such an act, disguised as a twist and a supposedly sincere bow to the consumers, is malicious and utterly disgusting; an example of the reach-around routes executives and presidents and board members take to save their art from any sort of genuine spark, settling for cheap, nonsensical, lazy emulation which drives the “ghost” (which is uttered probably 5 trillion times) of the material back into its slumber. Never mind the faux Fifth Element nonsense and the Clint Mansell techno flavoring; this is nothing less than a despicable, hollowing experience, destined to play as visual/aural showcases at big box stores in the mall while young children gape towards Johansson’s face as they pass, unaware how the material, the images, the action, the writing don’t belong to her, instead only witnessing another White savior in a decidedly Japanese story. The “ghost” is missing, but that’s not all. It’s also been stolen, reconfigured, whitened like a pair of shiny chompers, and then twisted to bring out pity for a loss of culture even though its very desecration was written as an active attempt of justification by three White writers. It’s so nauseating and foul that even a giant robot spider couldn’t slide an unmoving line of horror off my face.

Matt Singer

Just after the first action sequence, a voice called out from behind me in the darkened theater: "Damn, that is a bad bitch."