Is Scarlet Johannson The Best Choice For Ghost In The Shell?
The prospect of an American studio taking a foreign property for their own is one that is, let’s just say, met with a certain amount of trepidation. Although it is true that when we watch shows like Avatar and Dragonball Z, we allow our minds to wander through the possibilities of what these could accomplish on the big screen with the kind of budget afforded the blockbusters that litter our cinematic year, the fact is that almost always, these beloved stories are beaten to a pulp by ham-fisted story-telling and poor personnel choices, from actor to writer to director. When Ghost in The Shell was first rumored to having been picked up by Dreamworks, a collective sigh washed over us all. Even with a slight pang of optimism that this COULD break 
the mold, chances are it would meet the same fate as all its other kin, a mix up of what could have been meeting executive how it is in a daring feat of ‘how much can we undermine the source material?’
That was, until Scarlet Johannson was announced as having signed on to be the female lead of the film. Now, now we’re getting somewhere. The second biggest actress at the moment, only behind Jennifer Lawrence, with both and Chris Pratt making up the highest-grossing actors of 2014, being the first name attached to the western remake of one of the most highly regarded anime films of all time? We couldn’t ask for a better start… Except, that we could.
As with any foreign property, Ghost In The Shell comes with its own weight worth of cultural context. A Japanese animated film, based on a manga, set in Japan, with Japanese characters, there’s a lot to be said for how the original creation is represented, which is to say, usually badly. The aforementioned films of Avatar (The Last Airbender) and Dragonball Z (Dragonball Evolution) both had huge gaping holes where their core principles and themes should’ve been, and both were universally panned. Not only were they badly written heaps of poor CGI and limping story, they also both contained casts that were whitewashed – the term given when directors and film-producers default to a white cast, completely ignoring the racial and ethnic foundations of the characters. This is where the crux of the issue with Scarlet’s casting lies.
Ghost in the Shell’s protagonist is named Motoko Musanagi, and she is very firmly Japanese. She lives in Japan, serves to protect Japan under Japan’s government, she is Japanese. No-one is questioning whether or not Scarlet is going to knock it out of the park as the lead in a futuristic sci-fi thriller, hell we’re all but begging Marvel for a Black Widow film, but The Avengers star being chosen has squandered an opportunity to hire someone more immediately suited to the role.
Chiaki Kuriyama, who has starred in both Battle Royale and Kill Bill Vol. 1, Tao Okamoto, the female lead Mariko in 2013’s The Wolverine, Fan Bingbing, an X-Men: Days of Future Past alumni who has had a very successful career in Chinese cinema, and perhaps the biggest missed trick of them all Rinko Kikuchi (pictured), an Academy Award nominee who most recently starred in blockbuster Pacific Rim; these are all perfect choices for Motoko, and all already have their foot in the door with western audiences. Picking up any of these actresses for this new film would have sent a very strong message of diversity, and would have proven that Dreamworks know the exact kind of property they have, and the exact kind of film they want to make, i.e. one that fans of the original actually want to see, while not hurting appeal to the masses.
Of course, they could, and most likely are given this news, be going to go down the route of transposing Ghost in the Shell’s setting and characters from Japan to America, or somewhere else that isn’t obviously non-Western society. This further deepens the hole of doubt as gutting a something like Ghost in the Shell means not really making a Ghost in the Shell film. Sure, taking a story and only working with the concept while dancing around it with our own bright lights and bravado has paid off in the past with films such as The Magnificent Seven and Edge of Tomorrow, but these also had a very self-reflective, almost satirical view of themselves. Without that sense of self-awareness, you end up in 1998 Godzilla territory, and we all know how that turned out. Changing the names of Ghost in the Shell’s characters and moving the location means that, in essence, what’s being made in a not-Matrix, not-Blade Runner film about the relationship between humans and machines with existentialistic leanings. The governmental bodies would need re-working to refit the political climate of it not being in Japan, with a particularly scathing look at America surely being 
written out in the process. In other words, it would be a production that would under any other name be heavily influenced by, but not actually be Ghost in the Shell.
This is where the most irksome part of Scarlet being given the role comes in – it feeds very directly into the Hollywood sales rhetoric that often meets claims of wanting greater representation in film. Doesn’t what the end product will be, really, if the rest of this cast is announced as pre-dominantly white and we boycott it, we’re telling them films with leading women don’t sell. If we do go see it regardless of whose cast, we’re telling them that cultural identity in a film doesn’t matter. It’s a lose lose, and all the while Hollywood studios count their money for the next sequel. A pernicious cycle that continues to value the same kind of actors for the same kind of roles while we struggle to adequately fund the creators and creations not feeding into it. The likes of Amma Asante and Jennifer Kent, whose films Belle and The Babadook were amongst critics’ favorites of last year, were independently released, and found their audience through being truly very good. They’re sensitive to their subjects, and choose to do their research, and the overall product is much better for it. A valuable asset seemingly forgotten here.
For what its worth, I’m still optimistic about what Dreamworks might be up to here. If the rest of the cast is as well-skilled as Scarlet and diversely chosen, and with the right kind of director and writers behind it, we might be onto something here. I cheered when I heard the news, and still amen’t wholly against it, but, its not my culture, ethnicity or national identity being ever so slightly trampled on. The fact of the matter is that the major film industry has a representation problem, and is seemingly refusing to address it or move away from it in any kind of meaningful way. Continuing to ignore race and creed while remaking stories from around the world is a very troublesome trend, and even the box office reflects those sentiments. What’s worse, taking properties such as this, and then handing us only one half of what would make a strong, fresh kind of leading character, is not a good precedent. Here’s hoping it’s only a small misstep to much greater pastures.
