Ghost in the Shell preview

The opening four-and-a-half minutes of the upcoming Ghost in the Shell live-action movie was released on Twitter today, and… I'm not particularly impressed.

ICYMI: watch an extended clip from #GhostintheShell from the beginning of the movie. pic.twitter.com/pk2YVOkqlL

— Paramount Pictures (@ParamountUK) March 22, 2017

First, the good stuff: it looks pretty nice, if less grimy than the source material, and there are some great designs - the robo-spider geisha is incredible.

The rest feels very wide of the mark.

Broadly speaking, this clip follows a similar template to the first scene of Mamoru Oshii's 1995 anime film: the Major drops off a roof and engages is a brief firefight through a window. But the anime's opening four minutes set up a lot of stuff for the rest of the movie. the opening shot pans through layers of data illustrating wordlessly the extent to which everything is connected to the network; we're given hints of the rivalry between Public Security Sections 6 and 9; they namedrop Project 2501, the ultimate antagonist of the film; the surgical (and lethal) tactics of Section 9 get demonstrated; and while we're only really introduced to the Major there's also dialogue with Batou and Togusa that sketches out their working relationships.

By comparison, the live-action scene doesn't even seem to have a reason for the Major to be on that rooftop (one of a few things that leads me to believe that this isn't actually the very first scene in the film). While she begins the clip by announcing, "I'm on site," the presence of surveillance equipment seems to surprise her, and she's even unaware of who in the building might be the target. Where the live-action film has her responding to an unforeseen event, the anime makes the Major herself the event - which may seem like a small change, but moving them from active to reactive participants fundamentally alters the audience's perception of both Kusanagi and Section 9.

The relatively bloodless gunfight in the live-action film may be more visually inventive than its anime counterpart, but the number of cuts before the Major comes through the window - followed immediately by slow-motion wallrunning and a ponderous examination of the scene - makes the scene feel much longer.

Maybe the most surprising thing is the decision not to rip off maybe the most iconic shot of the anime's opening sequence: the first demonstration of the Major's thermoptic camouflage. On the one hand they've already lifted quite a lot of the original's key moments, but to draw the line at this feels weirdly restrained.

Everything I've seen of the live-action Ghost in the Shell puts me off it - the most egregious marketing error is the decision to use a san-serif font on the logo - but somehow I'm intrigued to see the final product, no matter how much I can already tell it's going to infuriate me.

Ghost of a Shell

Possibly controversial opinion: there has never been a truly great version of Ghost in the Shell.

Even Masamune Shirow's original 1989 manga is uneven, lurching from philosophy to comedy to body horror to tedious politicking to pornography at its author's whims. Mamoru Oshii's 1995 anime feature stripped back the humour (and sex) to present a more thematically coherent story, but lost a lot of the characters' humanity along the way. Stand Alone Complex is an uneasy mix of both, bringing back the comic relief Tachikoma robots (Fuchikoma in the manga) but still too serious for its own good. Innocence, Oshii's 2004 sequel to his own film, is immensely tedious.

The upcoming live-action Hollywood adaptation does not appear to be shaping up "great".

The visual style, half-heartedly copied from various parts of the anime and manga universes, doesn't inspire confidence. The Major's thermoptic camouflage nudity is imported from Oshii, but the live-action film hasn't fully committed to its source, or brought any of its own ideas to the table. It's replaced a quick, brutal demonstration of Section 9's tactics and efficiency with a slo-mo gun ballet setpiece that's not been fashionable since the Matrix sequels. The Major stark waking silhouette against the skyline has been converted to an indistinct, oppressive grey. The production design generally echoes the anime film's grimy future Hong Kong setting, but it's all so clean and shiny. What the hell have they done with Batou's eyes?

The most obvious shortcoming from the recently-released trailer is the plot. "How do I know I really exist when even my brain is artificial?" has been unceremoniously dumped for a "stolen past" storyline whose conclusion I'm expecting to be as unexciting as it will be predictable.

Plus, why in the hell is Aramaki shooting people? The man's a bureaucrat, a politician - more spymaster than police chief. His strength lies in outsmarting criminals and his superiors, not firepower. Maybe this is just a sign that the film is leaving behind its cerebral roots for a more mass-market action film - which just begs the question: why bother licensing the title at all, if you're going to throw everything else out?

(And none of this even starts to address the whitewashed elephant in the room.)

One trailer isn't much to go on, to be fair. Maybe they've just done a bad job with this one; it wouldn't be the first film to misrepresent itself in its marketing. But I'm not getting a good vibe off this thing.