Posted: Thu Mar 30, 2017 12:00 pm
From what I've now heard/read, the actual film takes whitewashing to an entirely new level--but discussing why means major (ha ha) spoilers, as follow (using a quote box to hide the text, but it's really not a quote):
I'm going to be referring to this version of GitS as "alt-fact GitS"--if I ever refer to it again at all.
And then just to insult us further, they've Hollywood-ized the plot so that there is more of Robocop than of GitS to it. It's like they bought the franchise name only as an empty shell, and placed McDonald's clown's ghost in it to make it palatable to American audiences.Not only is Johansson playing "the Major" Mira Killian, but in the film the "real" Motoko Kusanagi was a Japanese woman who was kidnapped and "killed" so that her brain could be used in what becomes the machine-human hybrid Mira Killian--Kusanagi is "destroyed to allow the Major to exist" (Opam, The Verge, http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/29/15114 ... -johansson). So they've literally killed off Kusanagi as a Japanese character so that they can have a white character in her place. The director is either incredibly self-aware (and flipping us off in the process), or he's made a terrible miscalculation as to how to get around the original character's "Japaneseness." To make matters worse, the non-white portion of the cast is primarily backdrop for the white actors.
I'm going to be referring to this version of GitS as "alt-fact GitS"--if I ever refer to it again at all.