Mamoru Oshii’s seminal anime looked ahead to a future where man and machine are one. Rupert Sanders’ remake, starring Scarlett Johansson, appears to be looking backwards – to RoboCop, The Matrix and Bourne

When science fiction is no longer looking forward, does it lose all meaning? That was my first thought after viewing the first full trailer for Ghost in the Shell.

I’ve always thought of sci-fi as territory for inquiring minds, for those who long for a glimpse of the next step in human – perhaps even machine – evolution. Which is why it’s deeply unsettling, to say the least, that Rupert Sanders’ upcoming remake of Mamoru Oshii’s seminal anime seems to be relying on tried and test Hollywood tropes to sell itself to us.

Most readers will already be aware of the controversies surrounding the new version. Johansson’s casting as the Major (Major Motoko Kusanagi in the original anime and preceding mangas) has drawn criticism from Asian-American actors who wondered why it was necessary to cast a non-Asian actor in such a quintessentially Japanese role. A counter-argument goes that Kusanagi has blue-violet eyes that feature no epicanthic fold, so it is perfectly acceptable for her to be played by Johansson – a point that rather ignores the fact that most females in anime have a similar appearance.

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What’s notable from the trailer is that Sanders and his team have also surrounded Johansson with a mostly white supporting cast. The intention may be to avoid drawing attention to the American actor’s ethnicity, but it only serves to create a bizarre whitewashed vision of the land of the rising sun. I was reminded of David Fincher’s remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, featuring a mostly English cast but somehow still set in Sweden. That movie just about worked because Fincher perfectly captured the icy Nordic noir of the novels.

The same trick does not appear to be working for Ghost in the Shell, where every glimpse of cyborg geisha girls in the trailer just makes us wonder why everyone in this Japanese anti-cybercrime division (with the exception of Takeshi Kitano’s Chief Daisuke Aramaki) seems to be white.

And yet Sanders appears to have committed an even more devious crime with the remake. The original Ghost in the Shell was a complex treatise on the nature of sentience, imagining a future in which humans have become so much like machines that we may have more in common with them than each other. In its scope and intellectual ambition, the film dwarfs more recent offerings such as Ex-Machina (on the big screen) and Westworld and Humans (on TV) precisely because it is prepared to leave the comfortable boundaries of human experience behind and imagine a world where consciousness is shifting into multifarious forms, and society’s interconnectedness is sweeping away concepts such as human individuality and ushering in something new and unknown.

The original film doesn’t just examine the next stage of evolution – the one we can easily get our heads around – it looks beyond the curve of the horizon to the stage beyond that, to the unsettling, darkling reality of our own fusion with technology. Meanwhile, the Hollywood remake appears to be looking in the opposite direction.

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We can only hope that the final movie offers more ambition, because the trailer seems to be trying to convince us that Ghost in the Shell is (conveniently) a lot like a fair few other Hollywood movies that we might have seen and liked. From Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop the screenwriters have swiped the idea that the Major had another, perhaps more human, existence before she was “stolen” to be transformed into a hot but terrifying superpowered cybercop. This sense of a mysterious past waiting to be discovered is present in scores of hit Hollywood movies, from the Jason Bourne series to The Matrix, which of course was also partially inspired by Ghost in the Shell. The network has come full circle.

The trailer is visually splendid – as an ex-commercials director, Sanders has a fabulous eye for striking imagery. But the original Ghost in the Shell wasn’t about who the Major once was; it was about who she is going to become. So there’s a sense that the film-makers have not just whitewashed Oshii’s film, but Hollywoodised it too. I’m not sure which is the greater crime.