Here, everything is given a setup and a payoff. Often, near-future science-fiction throws its shiny toys into the sandpit simply for the sake of it. Oshii meticulously molds his use of technology with sizzling, brutal bursts of action, giving every unique element of this futuristic world a use rather than using it for cosmetic purposes. It deals with the effect of cybernetics and the mistreatment of technology without ever claiming that the technology itself is to blame. Ghost in the Shell treats it as a necessary part of human evolution and experience. Ultimately, cyberpunk treats its futuristic world and its technological reliance as a deeply frightening and damaging prospect. They are not in opposition to the establishment but rather tasked with maintaining it, suggesting that civilization is not the cesspool that cyberpunk is so often preoccupied with. As members of the police force they do not exist to rebel, nor do they act out of self-preservation – quite the opposite in fact. The characters of Ghost in the Shell, contrarily, more or less fight the good fight.
Cyberpunk often preoccupies itself with the action and inaction of morally ambiguous figures fighting against some form of oppressive regime or a world marred by corruption and poverty. This premise itself lends the film, and the entire franchise really, the classification of a post-cyberpunk story. The Major’s team is tasked with tracking down the Puppet Master, a cyber criminal that’s hacking into people’s cyberbrains to procure information and commit further crimes. Many are more cybernetic than human, possessing only the “ghost” that may or may not be the remains of their human consciousness. Most are, to at least some extent, cybernetically enhanced. Set in 2029 and based on Shirow Masamune’s manga of the same name, the human race has reached its technological peak. It’s a cold, calculated, machine-like work of art that demands the mildest of emotional investment from its viewer and yet doesn’t suffer for it. It’s an ironically heartless film but not one bereft of a soul. Identity and the value of life are the themes at the heart of Ghost in the Shell, with sexuality, privacy, and political interference observed to lesser but not under-served extents.
Our first instinct, particularly when seeing her superhuman abilities in the film’s opening sequence, is to disregard her as little more than a cyborg, but the film spends the rest of its brisk 83 minute run-time destabilizing that line of thinking without actually giving any right or wrong answers. He wants the Major to appear doll-like, not quite enough like us despite her feminine voice and her human appearance. It’s one of many very deliberate choices in Mamoru Oshii’s now legendary science fiction classic, Ghost in the Shell. When Major Kusanagi of Section Nine, an elite police division, looks long enough at us through the screen, we realise that she doesn’t blink.
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