This analysis contains spoilers for the new Ghost in the Shell movie. Proceed with caution!

Over the weekend, I dragged my best friend—a biracial Japanese dude I’ve known for over a decade—to watch the new Ghost in the Shell movie. Like Ars Technica’s Sam Machkovech, we weren’t impressed. To my surprise, though, I didn’t actually hate Scarlett Johansson's role in the movie.

Her casting as the Major has been controversial, in part due to concerns about "whitewashing" (using white actors to play non-white characters). Yet Mamoru Oshii, director of the original 1995 anime, was unexpectedly supportive of the decision. Maybe that's because Johansson doesn’t pretend to be Motoko Kusanagi, the boisterous lead character from the original. Johansson's new character, Mira Killian, comes across as pure automaton, a blank slate devoid of emotional ties.

But this blankness, which permeates the film, is a symptom of Ghost in the Shell's broader failure to understand its source material, and it's here that the film's deeper problems lie.

A missing philosophy

The new film's director, Rupert Sanders, said in an interview with Motherboard that he loved the original anime and wanted to “be part of the legacy of Ghost in the Shell... The world really blew my mind... It was this beautiful futuristic world that I had never really seen anywhere: crazy characters, sexualized, philosophized.”

Sanders describes his movie repeatedly as an “international” film, one he has updated with a more familiar plot, because “you can’t lead” with themes of dualism, reflections on technology, and “all those things that are Ghost in the Shell.” So what does he think the franchise’s most memorable moments are? He names them: “The water fight, exploding geisha heads, Major on the tank, Major jumping off the roof. Those things are iconic, and if they weren't in there, people would be upset, myself included.”

But I'm not sure Sanders understands how or why these moments became so iconic. His interpretation of the original film—which was slower, indeed almost glacial in places—centers on explosive energy and plumes of broken glass; it's Daft Punk gone the way of the Boondock Saints. Consequently, Sanders' rebooted version of Ghost in the Shell is a peculiar hodgepodge of original scenes and lines, sutured together without much rhythm. We get the hacked garbage collector without the poignancy of his subsequent revelations, while the water fight that Sanders mentions is almost caricatured. And Mira Killian has none of Motoko Kusanagi’s restraint as she beats her quarry without compassion.

As the action gets more frenetic, the thoughtful theme of humans merging with machines becomes blander. Kuze—another abductee crammed into a Caucasoid form—begs Major to merge with him. Why? We learn only that he was Motoko’s boyfriend in life. However, that romantic connection is never truly explored. It's as if the love story was included because that is just what you do in Hollywood. What could be more compelling than star-crossed love?

The 1995 Ghost in the Shell has a more complex understanding of why two entities might want to merge. In the climactic scene, the Puppet Master presents Kusanagi with a compelling proposition. All life seeks to multiply, it tells Kusanagi, and diversification is essential to ensure the survival of any lineage. So it seeks to merge with her—the flawed human and the flawed program—to create something bigger than them both. “To be human,” the Puppet Master tells Kusanagi, “is to continually change.”

There is irony to this line in the context of the new film. The new Ghost in the Shell movie embodies that idea of constant change, but its cross-pollination of Western sensibilities with the source material doesn't quite work. It clings to the stylings of the original franchise, lifting certain vignettes wholesale. But while the original anime was intrinsically Japanese, Sanders’ rendition is fundamentally American in ways that go beyond mere casting.

Both Motoko Kusanagi and Mira Killian repeatedly ask of the world, “Who am I?” But where the former searches for meaning in context of the greater whole, the latter faces inward, obsessed with the individual. Killian’s entire arc in the movie is classic Hollywood. She is indistinguishable from most other American action heroes rather than a metaphor for a larger concept. The political landscape of the movie is strictly incidental, a background for Killian’s personal struggles. Even the tragic twist introduced in the third act is simply fuel to propel her personal narrative.