Curator Watchlist
A visually polished but emotionally chilly cyberpunk remake that has enough atmosphere, production design, and action craft to intrigue genre fans, even if its identity politics and adaptation choices are hard to ignore. It’s worth watching if you’re curious about the look and ideas more than the execution.
Where to watch: Buy
Wed · 1h 47m
Director: Rupert Sanders
Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Takeshi Kitano, Pilou Asbæk
In the near future, Major is the first of her kind: a human saved from a terrible crash, then cyber-enhanced to be a perfect soldier devoted to stopping the world's most dangerous criminals.
Rupert Sanders
Scarlett Johansson, Takeshi Kitano, Pilou Asbæk
A visually polished but emotionally chilly cyberpunk remake that has enough atmosphere, production design, and action craft to intrigue genre fans, even if its identity politics and adaptation choices are hard to ignore. It’s worth watching if you’re curious about the look and ideas more than the execution.
Ghost in the Shell is a glossy, sometimes eerily beautiful piece of studio cyberpunk that never quite finds the soul inside its machinery. The film has a strong sense of texture: neon cityscapes, rain-slick surfaces, and a melancholy digital future that can be genuinely absorbing when it stops explaining itself and just lets the imagery breathe.
Its biggest problem is that it feels assembled from familiar sci-fi parts without fully committing to the philosophical or emotional questions it raises. The adaptation choices are impossible to separate from the viewing experience, and they hang over the film even when the action is working. Still, there’s a certain cold elegance to the whole thing, and the production design does a lot of heavy lifting.
As a standalone genre object, it’s more interesting than its reputation suggests, but also less satisfying than it wants to be. If you come for atmosphere, cybernetic identity, and polished spectacle, there’s enough here to justify a look. If you want a sharp, resonant remake, it’s a harder sell.
davidehrlich (2.5★) · 1432 likes
well… those were definitely some choices.
SilentDawn (0.5★) · 994 likes
5 Leaving the theater last night, having just sat through the excruciating experience of Ghost in the Shelll, I was furious. I wasn't merely furious at the misconstrued world-building, all imitation and no flair, all dazzling 1990s sci-fi dress-up and no semblance of imagination. I wasn't simply furious at the tattered remnants of a screenplay and its constant tendency of oversimplification in regards to its existentialism and its gender ambiguity. I wasn’t *only* furious at the incoherent action, cut together… more
Matt Singer · 824 likes
Just after the first action sequence, a voice called out from behind me in the darkened theater: "Damn, that is a bad bitch."
will (0.5★) · 628 likes
so are we just going to ignore the fact that a japanese woman was kidnapped and turned into a caucasian robot? this might be the most sinister film i've ever seen in my life.
Chris 🍉 (0.5★) · 518 likes
"yeah this movie is whitewashed but it's also a criticism of whitewashing so its revolutionary... handled so well" (basically what i gathered skimming reviews) why don't y'all just shut the fuck up and cast rinko kikuchi instead of this boring ass white lmfaoooo
A foundational cyberpunk mood piece with the same fascination for identity, memory, and urban decay.
For viewers who want a more emotionally expansive and visually controlled meditation on artificial life.
A landmark of animated dystopian sci-fi with kinetic energy and a similarly influential future-city aesthetic.
Shares the body, mind, and reality questions, but delivers them with sharper momentum and cleaner genre payoff.
A sleek near-future thriller about surveillance, systems, and the cost of technological certainty.
Another cold, melancholy exploration of personhood and what it means to be made rather than born.
A compact, cerebral AI story that turns questions of consciousness into a tense chamber drama.
A leaner, nastier body-tech thriller with strong action choreography and a similar fascination with augmentation.
A pulpy identity thriller that plays with memory, manufactured selves, and corporate control.
A grimy, immersive future-noir about mediated experience, obsession, and a city on the edge.
A cult cyberpunk artifact that pairs digital paranoia with a similarly stylized near-future world.
For a more surreal and body-conscious take on technology blurring the line between self and system.
identity and selfhood, cybernetics, memory and consciousness, body modification, corporate power, surveillance, artificial intelligence, alienation
cyberpunk, near-future, dystopia, philosophical sci-fi, body horror, identity crisis, neon-noir, corporate intrigue, action spectacle, existential