‘Ghost in the Shell’ Review: Scarlett Johansson Takes Us to a Souped-Up Yet Familiar Future

Marshaling the very latest in digital photography, stereoscopic imaging and cutting-edge effects, “Ghost in the Shall” is a technical knockout, a here-and-now valentine to what design wizardry Hollywood can pull off in 2017.

The Major (here named Mira Killian, though in the Japanese versions she goes by Motoko Kusanagi — and the film does address the whitewashing controversy in its own way) is both an employee and product of the Hanka Corporation, a robotics and defense conglomerate in futuristic New Port City.

[...] both are rather wanting.

What inventive verve the former ad-man Sanders (who’s only on his second feature length film, after 2012’s “Snow White and the Huntsman”) lacks, he makes up for in his focus and work ethic, in his dedication to recreating the idiosyncratic anime world and making it sing in live-action.

Sanders, alongside production designer Jan Roelfs (“Gattaca”) and cinematographer Jess Hall (“Transcendence”), practically uses the 1995 version as blueprint, pre-vis and storyboard, filling in the empty spaces between 2D animation and 3D blockbuster with a number of allusions to “Blade Runner,” “Minority Report.” and “A.I.” (That the latter two come from “Ghost in the Shell” executive producer Steven Spielberg seems no happy accident.)

Short of the Wachowskis’ “Speed Racer,” “Ghost in the Shell” is the closest translation of the highly specific anime style ever mounted in live action, and between the two films, there’s only one that won’t incite an epileptic fit.