To date, Paramount’s extensive marketing spiel for the imminent Ghost in the Shell movie has included full-blown trailers steeped in cyberpunk goodness, five-minute clips highlighting the film’s greatest action scenes, and a smattering of viral clips designed to familiarize budding viewers with The Major. All of that comes to a head today with the release of the new and indeed final trailer for Rupert Sanders’ live-action pic, and it’s arrived just in time.
With a March 31st release date fast approaching, today’s promo draws attention to Scarlett Johansson’s Major, a character imbued with great strength and super-sharp reflexes. Unlike Johansson’s other heroines – save for maybe the alluring artificial intelligence seen in Her – The Major is a best-in-class synthetic capable of spearheading a counter-terrorism unit known as Section 9.
Their mission involves cleaning up the streets of neo-Tokyo, but as Ghost in the Shell unfolds, ScarJo begins to suspect that there’s something bigger at play, particularly when she comes into contact with Kuze, the rogue AI played by Michael Pitt. If his spine-chilling threats are any indication, Kuze holds some of the answers to Major’s past, along with her dubious relationship with Hanka Corporation, the nefarious organization that manufactured her (it?) in the first place.
On March 31st, Ghost in the Shell will usher in an exciting new era of Hollywood manga movies. Death Note and Robert Rodriguez’s all-star Alita: Battle Angel are also gestating in various stages of development, though it’s fair to say both features will face a similar conundrum to Rupert Sanders’ adaptation in that their success will largely hinge on their ability to entertain a broad audience, not just those familiar with the respective source material.
