'Ghost in the Shell' Just Got Wrecked by Honest Trailers

The Major was ripped apart and put back together again and again in Ghost in the Shell, but she might never recover from the beatdown Honest Trailers just delivered.

Honest Trailers isn’t known for being terribly kind, but Screen Junkies’s famed comedy section really laid into the recent American adaptation of Ghost in the Shell, based on Masamune Shirow’s famed manga series of the same name.

“Hollywood is running out of stuff from the 80s and 90s to remake,” the trailer’s deep, dramatic voice says. “Now, they’re remaking a film they’ve already been ripping off for decades, but with controversial casting, a dumbed down plot, just enough recreated scenes from the anime to put it in the trailers, and a complete lack of understanding about what made the franchise popular to begin with.”

The trailer goes on to call Scarlett Johansson’s Major a combination of every role she’s had before — “an enhanced, special op, sexy-robot-voice, stoic outsider white girl who feels out of place in Asia” — and then really gets into the whitewashing controversy that’s surrounded the film since Johansson was announced in the lead role.

“Watch as the studio avoids a whitewashing controversy by showing off how multicultural their version of Hong Kong is, and explaining that Major’s body is just a robot shell for someone else’s brain,” the trailer says. “Then cringe in disbelief as the studio manages to ruin their own solution by revealing that, yep, she was full-blown Japanese all along.

“Way to double down, gang! You just tried to put out a dumpster fire with a much larger, easily avoidable dumpster fire.”

It’s a really good thing the Major can’t technically feel pain because, damn, that was brutal.