Film

No future

Ghost in the Shell, a groundbreaking, subversive 1995 piece of Japanese anime, gets a live-action redo with Scarlett Johansson sporting a formfitting flesh suit and a bunch of plot enhancers aimed at making the story more humanistic and straightforward.

The results are always good to look at, but the puffed-up plot and safe PG-13 rating keep the film far away from being an upgrade on the original. It’s a largely boring, misguided affair.

Johansson can’t be faulted for the film’s failures. She could’ve been a solid choice to play Major, a human brain inside a synthetic cyborg’s body policing the streets of a futuristic dystopia that makes the Blade Runner landscapes look like Lincoln, Nebraska, in comparison.

As she has proven in Lucy and playing Black Widow, Johansson is a capable action hero. She also fares well as somebody placed in an artificial body, as she did in Under the Skin. She does a good job of appearing slightly lost, but centered, a character who is in that body somewhere, but isn’t entirely whole. Most importantly, she can play a robot without seeming robotic. She gives Major some decent dimensions.

Unfortunately, Major also has a new plotline that involves her past life, a mystery that overwhelms the action and turns the film into a bit of a melodramatic exercise. There are themes from the original anime and subsequent TV series that are expanded upon—perhaps too much—and it slows the film down.

While the original had a hard-nosed, gritty crime noir edge to it, director Rupert Sanders (Snow White and the Huntsmen) goes for something softer and a little whiny. He also has a problem injecting anything resembling humor in the film. The movie is void of even the mildest of chuckles.

As far as set designs go, Ghost in the Shell is a visual winner, although a derivative one. Instead of Blade Runner’s geisha billboards you get gigantic geisha holograms acting as skyscraper-tall advertisements. There are action scenes that do the original anime justice, as well as pay homage to the likes of The Matrix. None of it feels altogether original, but it does look good.

While the plot only mildly resembles the original, there are moments from the anime that are totally recreated in the redo. They include Major’s liquid birth scene and her diving off a skyscraper, the moment where Major tears herself apart while attacking a tank—although far less gory thanks to that PG-13 rating—and a scene where Major battles a bad guy in a lake. Fans of the original will take in these moments with either glee or unimpressed boredom.

Michael Pitt shows up late in the film as Kuze, an altered version of a character from the TV series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. He essentially replaces the Puppet Master from the original movie, an entity able to hack into other cyborgs and intelligence systems. Pitt, always the eccentric actor, embraces the opportunity to look and act really weird, which he does nicely. He turns Kuze into an interesting, tortured being. He’s one of the stronger elements in the film.

Legendary Japanese actor Takeshi Kitano plays Aramaki, a prominent character in the original given a new spin. Kitano has a scene where Aramaki dispatches enemy forces while using his briefcase as a shield, and it might be the best action moment in the movie.

No doubt, this one was being set up as a franchise for future movies, but the continuation of the saga seems doubtful anytime soon. Ghost in the Shell cost a lot of money. It was supposed to be a domestic blockbuster, and it’s getting beat by a cartoon baby voiced by Alec Baldwin.

The better bet would be to make further animated stories, and continue the saga of Major that way. No live actors required. Ω

“i am a robot. Beep, beep, boo, bop boop.”

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3Beauty and the Beast This live-action take on the classic Disney animated musical isn’t a shot-for-shot remake of the original like, say, Gus Van Sant’s time-wasting Psychoeffort. However, it does follow a lot of the same plot points and incorporates enough of the musical numbers to give you that sense of déja vu while watching it. Thankfully, Emma Watson makes it worthwhile. Hermione makes for a strong Belle. Since director Bill Condon retains the music from the original animated movie, Watson is asked to sing, and it’s pretty evident that AutoTune is her friend. She has a Kanye West thing going. As the Beast, Dan Stevens gives a decent enough performance through motion-capture. The original intent was to have Stevens wearing prosthetics only, but he probably looked like Mr. Snuffleupagus in dailies, so they called upon the help of beloved computers. Like King Kong, the CGI creation blends in nicely with his totally human, organic cast member. The cast and crew labor to make musical numbers like “Gaston” and “Be Our Guest” pop with the creative energy of the animated version, but they don’t quite reach those heights. They are nicely rendered, for sure, but not on the masterpiece level that was the 1991 film. As for the romance between Belle and the Beast, it has a nice emotional payoff. In a way, the movie is a sweet tribute to the animated movie.

3The Devil’s Candy Writer-director Sean Byrne follows up his very good horror debut, 2012’s The LovedOnes, with this piece of heavy metal nastiness. Jesse (an unrecognizable Ethan Embry), a starving artist, and wife Astrid (Shiri Appleby) are moving into a new house with daughter Zooey (Kiara Glasco). Shortly before buying that house for a dirt-cheap price, they find out that the couple who lived there before died in some sort of accident. After moving in, a super creepy guy (Pruitt Taylor Vince) and former inhabitant of the house shows up on the doorstep looking to move back in. Naturally, Jesse says no and, naturally, creepy guy doesn’t stop. Byrne sets his story to heavy metal music, with Jesse’s family being devout followers of Metallica, and Vince’s creepy guy needing to play metal at night on his guitar to drown out the voice of the devil. If devil movies give you the heebie jeebies (like, for instance, last year’s TheWitch), you will probably find plenty to like in this one. Byrne is proving to be quite capable of cinematic freak-outs, and he has able partners in Embry and Vince. (Available for rent on iTunes, Amazon.com and On Demand during limited theatrical release.)

4Get Out Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a young AfricanAmerican man, is a little nervous. He’s going to visit the parents of Rose Armitage (Allison Williams), his white girlfriend. Rose is relaxed about the trip, but Chris is anxious. His anxiety proves justified shortly into the trip. Upon arrival at her large estate, her parents like Chris. They really, really like Chris. Actually, parents Missy and Dean (Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford) like Chris at a level that’s a bit unsettling. Chris shrugs it off at first, as does Allison, but strange things start happening. Writer-director Jordan Peele, the comedic performer from TV’s Key&Peele, and the adorable, funny cat movie Keanu, delivers a huge cinematic surprise with GetOut, a twisted, darkly satiric, nasty little horror film that pulls no punches when it comes to race relations and dating. Peele has cited NightoftheLivingDead and TheStepfordWivesas inspiration for this journey to the dark side of his creative soul. Those films’ influences are detectable, and I’d say you could throw in a pinch of Rosemary’s Babywith a side of BeingJohnMalkovichas well. Two of the hardest things to accomplish with a movie are to make people laugh and get them legitimately scared. GetOutmanages to do both for its entire running time.

3Kong: Skull Island The KingKongcinematic machine gets cranking again with Kong:SkullIsland, an entertaining enough new take on the big ape that delivers the gorilla action but lags a bit when he isn’t on screen smashing things. Among Kongincarnations, this one has the most in common with the 1976 take on the classic story, basically because it’s set just a few years earlier in ’73. While there is a beautiful girl the big guy does get a small crush on (Brie Larson as a photographer), the story eschews the usual “beauty and the beast” Kong angle for more straight-up monster vs. monster action. Unlike the past American Kong films, this one never makes it overseas to Manhattan, opting to stay on Kong’s island—thus, the title of the film. Kong himself is portrayed by motion-capture CGI, and he’s a badass. He’s also tall enough to be a formidable foe for Godzilla, a mash-up already announced for 2020. In the few scenes where he interacts with humans, Kong plays like an organic creature rather than a bunch of gigabytes. That’s right, there hasn’t been much mention of those human counterparts yet. That’s because, with the exception of John C. Reilly as a fighter pilot stranded on the island during World War II, most of the humans are bland. Tom Hiddleston might make a decent James Bond someday, and he’s a lot of fun as Loki, but he just doesn’t play here as a rugged tracker/action hero.

3Life This sci-fi/horror film starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Ryan Reynolds is an inconsistent but overall sturdy genre pic that looks great and ultimately delivers the goods despite a few slow patches and a couple of remarkably dumb moments. Credit director Daniel Espinosa for setting a grim tone and sticking with it through the very end. Life isn’t afraid to go to the dark place and stick around until the credits roll. Gyllenhaal and Reynolds play astronauts pulling a long haul on an international space station. Gyllenhaal’s David Jordan is actually about to break the record for consecutive days in space, and generally prefers life in the stars to life back on our miserable planet. The crew is awaiting a space capsule containing samples from Mars, and these samples will put forth an amazing discovery: life beyond our planet. Ship scientist Hugh Derry (Ariyon Bakare) discovers a cell, wakes it up, and marvels at its ability to grow at a rapid pace. He eventually finds himself marveling at the little guy’s ability to grab on to his glove and basically mulch the hand within it. So, as the viewer quickly discovers, life on Mars was probably a total shit show, because this globular nasty—a distant cousin of Steve McQueen’s The Blob—digs on killing everything in its path. The expedition goes from a triumphant discovery to ultra protective mode in a matter of seconds. If this thing gets to Earth, the Blue Planet will look like the Orange Planet virtually overnight. The movie hums along nicely for a while as the organism picks off crewmembers in grisly fashion.

5Logan Hugh Jackman—allegedly—says goodbye to Wolverine with Logan, a total shocker of a superhero movie that lays waste to the X-Menand standalone Wolverinemovies that came before it. Director James Mangold, who piloted the decent TheWolverine, revamps the character’s mythos, and pulls along Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) for the gritty, bloody, nasty, awesome ride. It’s the future, and the X-Men are gone. A mutant hasn’t been born in a quarter of a century, and Logan isn’t looking too hot. He’s driving a limo to make ends meet, coughing up blood, and basically not aging well. He’s doing a lot better than Xavier, the mutant formally known as Professor X, who’s prone to seizures and suffering from some sort of degenerative brain disease. In short, the days of X-Men glory are way, way over, with Logan and Xavier having a shit time in their autumn years. Just when it seems as if the pair will waste away in their miserable existence, along comes Laura (a dynamite Dafne Keen). She’s a genetically engineered mutant equipped with the same retractable claws and viciously bad temper as Logan. When her life becomes endangered, Logan throws her and Xavier in the back of his vehicle, and they are off on one wild, dark road trip.