
Flicks, Steve Newall
Coming nearly 30 years after the manga of the same name, Hollywood’s retelling of Ghost in the Shell draws liberally from 1995’s anime as well as plucking at the DNA of subsequent entries in the canon. Over the past decades, the ideas within - human/tech interfaces; the nature of consciousness - have been thoroughly mined elsewhere, most notably by The Matrix and, more recently, Ex Machina and TV's Westworld. In a sense, it’s fortunate that we’re not subjected to a retreading of familiar territory here, but in not offering anything new to ponder, 2017’s Ghost in the Shell only has surface-level entertainment to offer.
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