The new live action Ghost In The Shell doesn’t hit theaters until next Friday (March 31), but the first five minutes of the controversial film are already available to view on your own devices.
Paramount Pictures posted the alleged opening scene, “Building Jump Extended”, to YouTube yesterday, perhaps as a way to show fans the film isn’t as bad as people are claiming it to be. We’re told Ghost In The Shell isn’t being made available to critics until super late in the game, and the release build-up has leaned on viral marketing, to various degrees of success, so this looks like some pure direct-to-fans marketing.
Of course, Ghost In The Shell has been dogged by accusations of “white washing,” with Scarlett Johansson playing the lead role of Motoko “Major” Kusanagi, created by Masamune Shirow in 1989 as a Japanese manga character. “I certainly would never presume to play another race of a person,” Johansson has responded, via the NME. “Diversity is important in Hollywood, and I would never never presume to play another race of a person… Having a franchise with a female protagonist driving it is such a rare opportunity. Certainly, I feel the enormous pressure of that — the weight of such a big property on my shoulders.”
Watch the film’s opening sequence below. In the meantime, here’s the synopsis: “In the near future, Major (Scarlett Johansson) is the first of her kind: A human saved from a terrible crash, who is cyber-enhanced to be a perfect soldier devoted to stopping the world’s most dangerous criminals. When terrorism reaches a new level that includes the ability to hack into people’s minds and control them, Major is uniquely qualified to stop it. As she prepares to face a new enemy, Major discovers that she has been lied to: her life was not saved, it was stolen. She will stop at nothing to recover her past, find out who did this to her and stop them before they do it to others. Based on the internationally acclaimed Japanese Manga, The Ghost in the Shell.”