I heard an interesting theory after watching the live-action Ghost in the Shell remake: if a second-tier movie has to slap its marketing on every bus and billboard in town, it’s probably not a very good movie. It sounds like nonsense, but it does have some current day credence. These days, a handful of bad reviews online can kill a film’s momentum dead - more so if the very same film has been courting negative publicity before its release. Ghost In The Shell's original source material - a feature-length Japanese animated classic that instilled some refreshing existential philosophy into the cyberpunk genre - also had the definition of being a distinctly Japanese story with a distinctly Japanese cast. With the continuing furore of Asian actors being overlooked for its Western overhaul, it’s not too far-fetched to think that Paramount Pictures attempted to dodge accusations of whitewashing with its ubiquitous print campaigns subliminally telling us that, despite it all, their film is actually Very Good™. Unfortunately it’s all for naught. As headliningly A-list as its cast may be, and for all the distracting CGI it attempts to thrust upon the viewer to hide its flaws, Rupert Sanders’ re-telling of the original is still staunchly mediocre. It’s not a case of liberties being taken with the source material's underlying philosophical themes, either. In fact it's failings stem from a far more fundamental (and frustrating) source: it doesn’t seem to understand them at all.

It does at least have a loose understanding of how the original piece sets up though - copying it certainly not by verbatim but definitely by ear. It’s the near-future in an unnamed city (likely in Japan somewhere) and humanity has finally gone fully into bed with machinery. The revolution of cybernetic enhancement is at hand - practically everyone can switch bits of their body out for robotic improvement if they want to. But only recently - a year before the movie’s main story begins, in fact - has science been able to achieve the transplant of a living human brain into a fully artificial body (or ‘shell’). That’s exactly what the boffins at Hanka Robotics, one of the city’s numerous all-powerful conglomerates, have managed to achieve, and a year on from their monumental breakthrough the fruit of their labour - Major Mira Killian (Johansson) of the corporate counter-terrorism unit, Section 9, is proving to be an incredibly useful asset to the team she operates under. There’s just one issue from Mira’s perspective - any recollection from before her transfer to a robotic shell has been wiped. Although she has a single, fuzzy memory of her family dying to get her into the city, her lack of a former identity is a side-effect which, through her conversations with fellow Section 9 agent and confidant Batou (Pilou Asbaek), is revealed to be giving her some existential angst.

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Luckily, there’s a villain on hand with the potential to give her that much longed-for mental jolt: a mysterious hacker by the name of Kuze (Michael Pitt), who’s been targeting Hanka’s own line of automatons as a means to attack Hanka Robotics' higher command. His deadly appropriation of the company's geisha-bots during a meeting between Hanka officials and an African diplomatic party - one that Mira herself is on hand to protect - is just one of a number of criminal acts that have gotten him Section 9’s attention. But it’s not just Hanka’s products that Kuze has intimate knowledge of. He also appears to know a thing or two about Mira as well, and as she is sent on the hunt to bring him in, it’s only a matter of time before she comes face to face with Hanka’s nemesis, the truth behind the company’s operations and the real, earth-shattering answers to her own origins.

Though there are a few notable changes there that fans may cry foul over (wait, no Puppet Master?), ultimately it’s not too removed from the plot of Mamoru Oshii’s original work. It also has the a sizeable number of recognizable characters from the franchise as well, with most of Section 9’s motley crew of cybercrime specialists injected into the plot for fans to appreciate - or at least be appeased with. Alongside Batou, Mira is also joined by series stalwarts Daisuke Aramaki (a notably apathetic Beat Takeshi, even for his standards), Section 9’s wily chief of command, as well as the 100% human, vehemently non-cybernetic detective Togusa (Chin Han). But while it sounds like the right box-ticking on paper, it doesn’t take long for the film to show its flaws.

The opening scenes are nonetheless impressive, showing us how Mira came into being with artsy long-exposure slo-mos of a humanoid synthetic being getting put together, with all the audial overtures of this being a miraculous creation of life to go with it. But then two of the film’s additional characters, Dr. Ouelet (Juliette Binoche) and Cutter (Peter Ferdinando) - Hanka’s chief of design and CEO respectively - start talking, with the construction-complete Mira lying dormant in their midst. It only takes this brief exchange to demonstrate that Ghost in the Shell’s script is concerningly weak - some hackneyed dialogue about Mira’s purpose with who and what she is, delivered with little room for intrigue, is all we get for initial expose. This need for cliche then rolls into the following scenes where additional characters are introduced to the fore with an unrelenting determination to tell us explicitly who they are instead of having the film’s direction show us. This is especially the case when Section 9’s operatives get together for a first debriefing following Kuze’s first attack on Hanka - a chance, you might think, for the film to show the chemistry within this close-knit team (something various entries in the original franchise absolutely nail). But it unfortunately falls completely flat. Togusa’s rebuttal of his decision to not go with any cybernetic implants is awkward, and quips from the rest of the crew are similarly uninspiring. The result is dull scene after dull scene failing to give any of its characters a sense of personality, or build believable camaraderie between them, and ultimately they contribute to an opening half hour that instead of breathing life and purpose into the movie, feels brute forced, stilted and cold.

It should be noted too that the awkwardness doesn’t stop with the cast’s opening exchanges. Ghost in the Shell’s heavy reliance on CGI all throughout its runtime - a trait you’d think would enhance the cyberpunk atmosphere and themes - results in some awfully garish shots at certain points. This is particularly the case when showcasing its many, many camera pans over the city landscape, with which we are constantly treated to an ugly mish-mash of grey monolithic towers interspersed with gigantic, terrible-looking looping holograms that seem to serve no purpose save to indicate that the city planning department are in need of firing solely on artistic grounds. The effects definitely look better during the action sequences, which often rely on much more confined scenery, but the film is clearly quite proud of showing off its world to you, likely as some kind of misguided homage to the original movie’s ability to evoke a dark, neon magic with its own similar panoramas. And by and large it looks terrible, leaving the film grasping for other ideas to keep itself from descending into full drudgery.

Regardless of what these other ideas wind up being, continued tribute and emulation of the original is certainly one of the things the movie keeps coming back to. Scenes from the animated version are present throughout and are almost identical shot-for-shot: certain moments such as a fight sequence between Mira and a ‘hacked’ augmented truck driver in a flooded courtyard, her final climactic encounter with a ‘spider’ tank, and her dives off of skyscraper roofs into the fray of combat will all be familiar to fans of the original. These are actually the better moments of the film too - when the film instead tries to be original with its action, it comes off as remarkably bland and predictable.

The mediocrity is also no real fault of the acting talent put to task here either. As Mira, Johansson still puts in a strong performance despite the numerous script failings and the controversy surrounding her casting. She may not be Motoko Kusanagi - the original’s main protagonist who’s been curiously and controversially un-Japanesed here - but she’s still very close, instilling the same kind of stoic self-introspection and nullified manner of speaking that made her Japanese namesake character such a compelling lead in the original. Alongside her, Asbaek’s Batou is decent as well - both his and Johansson’s scenes together succeed in developing the same sense of conversational intimacy that his character and Kusanagi share in the animated film. But it’s only when we finally put a face to the antagonist hacker Kuze that the film actually becomes interesting - if only for a short while. Pitt’s performance as the main villain of the piece is more functional than outstanding, but the key scene involving his meeting with Mira at the film’s middle is a rare moment where the film gains some palpable dramatic tension. With such good performances put on by the central cast figures at this point, it’s even possible to believe that they could pull this film out of the doldrums that its opening left it lounging in. And that’s when the climax - focused around an awful attempt by the film to try and explain its questionable casting choices - promptly kicks you in the balls.

There won’t be any spoilers for the hows and the whys that it is so, but Ghost in the Shell’s ending doesn’t just squander the promise of its middle act - it also makes a mockery of the franchise’s legacy as well. In an incredible feat of inept, condescending writing, the unveiling of Mira’s past happens to not only act as both a flimsy explanation for why Johansson was cast over an Asian actress in the lead, but a proud proclamation that the themes of the original movie - even in the face of so many scenes being lifted straight from it - are trivial compared to just delivering a good ol’ Hollywood-fashioned ending. Fans of the first movie will find it particularly disheartening that the original’s philosophizing   on humanity’s advances under technology - both natural and metaphysical - are tossed aside to instead relay the simple tale of a female Robocop (which also does that movie a disservice). And it serves as a final, appallingly concocted nail in the coffin for a movie that frequently ties itself in knots to try and shake the accusations of racism it’s been subjected to, before simply giving up and becoming an even bigger farce than even initial online opinion could predict it to be.

As far as Western adaptations go, Ghost in the Shell is not a completely terrible rendition of a much-vaunted animated classic. Even if a lot of its better moments simply come via copying scenes straight out of the original or through its cast fighting to overcome a rushed, poor script, it’s still technically sufficient enough to provide some entertainment for those looking for a half-brained cyberpunk romp. But compared to the very film it’s trying to imitate, it is nowhere near smart enough, or good enough - and it needed to be both in order to escape its justifiable race-oriented criticisms.