While he showed some visual flair in Snow White and the Huntsman, director Rupert Sanders is certainly working with stronger source material when it comes to his next project. He’s adapted Masamune Shirow‘s iconic Japanese franchise Ghost in the Shell, which in this iteration follows Scarlett Johansson as a human-cyborg hybrid who goes up against a robotic company that’s over-stepping their boundaries. After a few all-too-brief teasers, the first trailer has now arrived, which has quite the impressive visual palette and has us more intrigued than we previously were.
“The story that Rupert and I are telling that we kind of agreed inspired us in the beginning. Bringing these pages to life is a kind of challenge,” Johansson tells Collider. “Because you can’t rip it off the page, it’s totally different. You’re playing it as a – it’s not really a person, but it’s a human brain, it’s someone who’s having this life experience. Which is very different from just ripping stuff off from the Manga. One thing that will be very different probably is we’re not making the Frank Miller world where those graphic novels come to life. We have kind of the iconic iconography of the Manga and stuff, but I think people will be surprised at the gritty kind of realness of this. For a person that doesn’t have a heart, it has a lot of heart, I think.”
With a cast also featuring Pilou Asbaek, Takeshi Kitano, Juliette Binoche, and Michael Pitt, as well as a score by Clint Mansell (The Fountain, Black Swan) check out the trailer, featurette, and poster below.
Update: See a side-by-side visual comparison between this film and the original.
Based on the internationally-acclaimed sci-fi property, “GHOST IN THE SHELL” follows the Major, a special ops, one-of-a-kind human-cyborg hybrid, who leads the elite task force Section 9. Devoted to stopping the most dangerous criminals and extremists, Section 9 is faced with an enemy whose singular goal is to wipe out Hanka Robotic¹s advancements in cyber technology.
Ghost in the Shell opens on March 31, 2017.