Ghost in the Shell (2017) Review: A Beautiful but Hollow Cyberpunk Remake

Originally published April 4th, 2017. Substantially revised September 8th, 2026.

Rupert Sanders’ Ghost in the Shell has an excellent science-fiction question at its center: if a corporation transfers your mind into a manufactured body, what exactly remains of you? Your memories? Your personality? Your capacity to choose? The film has the visual imagination to make that question feel urgent. Its neon city, towering holograms, and casually augmented bodies suggest a world in which technology has changed not only what people can do, but how they understand themselves.

Yet Ghost in the Shell (2017) ultimately turns that unsettling premise into a familiar origin story. It is a handsome, intermittently exciting cyberpunk thriller, but a much thinner philosophical film than it first appears to be. The more it explains the Major’s past, the less interested it becomes in the instability of identity that initially made the story compelling.

Stream, rent, or purchase Ghost in the Shell on Amazon.

The film’s strongest achievement is its environment. Sanders and his collaborators create a dense, rain-soaked metropolis in which technological enhancement has become ordinary. Cybernetic eyes, artificial limbs, and digital advertising are not presented as rare spectacles. They are part of the city’s daily texture. That decision gives the film’s visual design more force than its plot often deserves.

The enormous holograms hanging over the streets are especially effective. They make the city feel owned by corporations long before the story identifies Hanka Robotics as its central threat. Even the Major’s body has the polished, commercial quality of a product designed for public display. She is treated as an individual by those closest to her, but the world around her continually reminds us that she was manufactured, marketed, and deployed.

This setting creates the possibility of a truly unsettling film about embodiment. If bodies can be replaced, upgraded, or designed for military use, then physical appearance cannot offer a stable answer to the question of who someone is. The original 1995 Ghost in the Shell, included in my guide to metaphysical films, treats that uncertainty as its central condition. Cybernetic life is not an exception in that film. It is normal, which makes personal identity more difficult to define rather than easier.

The 2017 version is less patient. Its action scenes are cleanly staged, and the production design gives even its weakest moments a certain grandeur, but the film repeatedly rushes away from its most interesting implications. The city looks like a place where consciousness, class, surveillance, and bodily autonomy might collide. The story mostly uses it as a backdrop for a revenge plot.

At first, the Major’s uncertainty seems genuinely philosophical. She has memories that may not belong to her, a body she did not choose, and an employer with access to the technology that keeps her alive. The film appears ready to ask whether identity depends on memory, bodily continuity, or the choices a person makes after their past has been altered.

Instead, it gradually narrows the problem. The Major’s identity becomes something that can be recovered through a hidden backstory. Once the correct explanation is found, the film treats the mystery of the self as largely solved.

That is the central disappointment. A film about an artificial body should not need to reject personal history, but Ghost in the Shell treats history as an answer rather than a complication. It suggests that the Major can finally know herself once she learns who she used to be. The possibility that a person might be shaped by implanted memories, new attachments, and present choices receives far less attention.

Blade Runner 2049 handles a similar tension more effectively in its examination of what makes us human. Its characters are not freed from uncertainty when they discover the origins of their memories. The question becomes more difficult: if a memory was manufactured but still determines what a person loves, fears, and chooses, does its artificial origin make it meaningless?

That is the question Ghost in the Shell gestures toward, then abandons.

The casting of Scarlett Johansson was widely criticized as whitewashing before the film’s release, and any fair discussion of the issue should acknowledge that the franchise complicates simple claims about a character’s body. Mamoru Oshii, director of the 1995 anime, defended Johansson’s casting by arguing that a cyborg’s shell need not possess a fixed ethnicity (Rose, 2017). The Major’s body has never been a simple biological fact within the larger Ghost in the Shell universe.

But the 2017 film creates its own problem. It eventually reveals that the Major’s erased human identity is Motoko Kusanagi, a Japanese woman whose life was taken by the same corporation that rebuilt her. That choice makes Japanese identity narratively important after the film has already placed a white actor at its center.

This is why the casting cannot be dismissed as a merely external controversy. The film turns Motoko’s Japanese identity into evidence of corporate violence, then gives that identity little presence beyond fragments of memory and a late plot revelation. It uses an Asian setting, Japanese names, and Japanese cultural references, but does not allow the protagonist’s recovered past to reshape the film’s perspective.

The result is especially awkward because Ghost in the Shell is supposed to question the relationship between a person and a body. The film asks the audience to feel the loss of Motoko Kusanagi while presenting her reclaimed identity through a white shell designed for a Hollywood star. It makes cultural erasure part of the plot without fully reckoning with the erasure built into its own adaptation.

Scholar Qian Li argues that the 2017 film shifts the earlier version’s more open-ended posthuman inquiry toward an individualistic heroic narrative (Li, 2023). That shift helps explain why the live-action adaptation feels less intellectually adventurous. It does not merely change details from its source material. It replaces uncertainty with restoration. The Major is not transformed by an encounter with a new form of consciousness; she becomes a wounded protagonist recovering the correct version of herself.

Ghost in the Shell is not a bad film. It has real visual beauty, a strong sense of scale, and an appealingly strange world of corporate technology and bodily modification. Johansson’s controlled performance suits the Major’s alienation, even if the script rarely gives her enough interior life to make that alienation genuinely moving.

Still, the film remains a missed opportunity. Its best images suggest that identity might be unstable, collective, and impossible to recover in a pure form. Its story insists on the opposite. By the end, the self has become a fixed truth waiting to be uncovered, and the film’s most radical idea has been reduced to a conventional answer.

The larger question of whether technology changes human nature remains worth pursuing in science-fiction films about humanity and technology, while my list of films that make you question your identity offers stronger examples of cinema that allows uncertainty to remain unresolved.

Ghost in the Shell (2017) Rating: ★★★ out of 5

If you’d like to watch Ghost in the Shell (2017), it’s currently available to stream, rent, or purchase via Amazon.

Sources and Further Reading

• Li, Q. (2023). “Joseph Campbell’s Oriental mythology in Ghost in the Shell (1995) and Occidental mythology in Ghost in the Shell (2017).” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 10.
• Rose, S. (2017, March 31). “Ghost in the Shell’s whitewashing: Does Hollywood have an Asian problem?” The Guardian.