Ghost In The Shell Gets An Honest Trailer

Scarlett Johansson's Ghost in the Shell adaptation got a pounding from critics, and now it's getting another dubious honor– an Honest Trailer, which points out the movie's "literal whitewashing" and its many, many plot holes.

The Honest Trailer begins by pointing out the minds behind the movie– the same people behind Snow White and the Huntsman and the first three Transfomers sequels– before beginning to describe the film, calling it "the glossy Hollywood adaptation of a beloved Japanese anime that goes about as well as you'd expect." 

As the trailer would have it, Ghost in the Shell came about because Hollywood was running out of stuff from the 80's and 90's to remake, leading them to instead move to the property that they have been ripping off for decades. This time, though, they've added in "controversial casting and a dumbed-down plot with 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 says that Johansson combines all of her past roles as The Major, a robot cop with a pretty easily fixable weakness for getting snuck up on by guys with Tasers who the trailer describes as "an enhanced, special-ops, sexy robot voice, stoic outsider white girl who feels out of place in Asia."

The trailer also points out the studio's not so great attempts at avoiding a whitewashing controversy, which involved explaining how Major's body is just a robot shell for someone else's brain before eventually backtracking and saying that she was Japanese all along. "Way to double down, gang," the trailer says. "You just tried to put out a dumpster fire with a much larger, easily avoidable dumpster fire." 

The trailer ends by critiquing the movie's plot for being "boring" and describes it as having John Carter syndrome, "where the source material was so influential that now it feels like it's copying the films it inspired." 

If you headed out to theaters to see Ghost in the Shell, check out our rankings of how the movie's characters compare to the source material's.