It’s been a long time coming, but the second full-length trailer for Paramount’s Ghost in the Shell movie has finally arrived online, guns glazing – and it’s a doozy.
Following up on last week’s super-stylish TV spot, the footage above is essentially designed to flesh out the world of Rupert Sanders’ live-action blockbuster, as we see Scarlett Johansson’s no-nonsense Major Motoko Kusanagi – or The Major for short – hunt down the villainous Kuze and, perhaps most important of all, the truth. Engineered to be the flagship product of Hanka Robotics, ScarJo’s elite agent is one of the many ‘Ghosts’ populating Mamoru Oshii and Masamune Shirow’s lush, cyberpunk world, and it’s these souls that can be transferred into different cyborg bodies. Cue the inevitable identity crisis.
For The Major, though, she’ll spearhead an elite task force known as Section 9 into the bowels of the city, unraveling a mind-bending conspiracy as she goes. Kuze appears to be harboring some form of connection to Scarlett Johansson’s title lead (“I have been watching you. You have to remember”), judging by this latest reel of footage, which ought to tee up a thought-provoking dynamic between hero and foe.
What’s more, even though Ghost in the Shell can be traced all the way back to the late 1980s, ardent sci-fi fans will be able to locate a series of genre hallmarks peppered throughout the trailer above, be it the ültra-futuristic cityscape and its equally futuristic billboards (Blade Runner), or the ‘bullet time’ sequences made famous by The Matrix – in Hollywood, at least.
Ghost in the Shell boots online on March 31st. Michael Pitt, Takeshi Kitano and Juliette Binoche are among those on board.
