After a brutal terrorist attack, Mira’s body was damaged to the point where she needed a new one. Four new Ghost in the Shell TV spots have revealed exactly how Mira becomes the badass cyborg known as the Major, and the plot feels strikingly similar to the classic RoboCop.
On Thursday, Paramount released four new Ghost in the Shell TV spots containing the most detailed plot points for the film yet. The first spot, “Wake Up,” finds Scarlett Johansson’s, “the Major” awakening in her new cybernetic body after being nearly killed in an attack. She’s really uncomfortable and horrified that she can’t actually feel the rest of her body, indicating she’s pretty much a robot from the neck down.
The second spot, “Control,” establishes that the aim of putting Mira into the robot body was to save her, but now her mission is to “save others.” Still, that clear-cut mission isn’t all that it seems. As previous trailers have hinted, motives behind putting her into this new body aren’t entirely altruistic.
The third and fourth spots, called “Fog of Memory” and “Past,” combine elements of the other two as the Major starts to unravel the conspiracy of how and why she was turned into the weapon she has seemingly become. Basically, as soon as the Major is given her new mission, it looks like she’ll go rogue to fight the evil organization that put her in this predicament.
All four spots are also interspersed with footage of Scarlett Johansson with her cyborg body, but several shots show her having a decidedly more human-looking set of shoulders. This begs the question: At what point in the film will she actually get attacked and put inside of the robot “shell” that contains her?
In the original RoboCop, Peter Weller’s character, Murphy, was attacked pretty early in the film, but there was still a good chunk of the narrative which had him totally human before that. Because so much of this new footage has a “human” Scarlett Johansson, there’s a chance Ghost in the Shell might have a similar structure to RoboCop. And while the idea of a corrupt organization constructing the Major honors the manga and anime source material for Ghost in the Shell, it’s also the same thematic conflict of RoboCop, too.
Ghost in the Shell opens on March 31.
