Ghost in the Shell- Eh. Not very good but not awful. It alternates between flowing pretty well (most of the middle) and being pretty awkward (the beginning). The ScarJo casting never really bothered me for a couple reasons. The real problems with whitewashing are in the REST of the movie, with the characters who are you know, supposed to be full blooded human and not just a brain transplanted into another body (And let's not get into the dumb cultural appropriation arguments given that the entire concept of cyberpunk can, you know, be attributed to William Gibson). The problem with the movie is that it's really shallow. Instead of digesting and simplifying the themes, it just mostly goes for the easy out action movie route and bluntly tries to bull-rush through the anything resembling the issues the source material was trying to bring up. In the end, it just moves from Point A to Point B and until maybe just past halfway there's no reason for you to care at all.
The script is just awful. And the one thing that I think it does well is probably 100% unintentional. There was a whole thing about the trailers where people noticed they kept calling her "Major" and not "the Major". This ended up not being as much of a problem in the movie, but there are still instances where people call her Major (without the The) as if it were her name, and considering it, it actually really works in terms of taking away her personhood by referring to her rank as a name rather than a name. I guess it still works with the The in there, but eh.
ScarJo's body language and speech cadence really is successful at hitting that uncanny valley of not quite human (or at least, someone not quite used to their body), but this is never, ever brought up in the movie at all. Even a throwaway "The speech and movement issues will go away in time" or something would've really helped.
It goes pretty all in making it an original story using the Oshii movie’s setpieces as flagstones, with a hodgepodge of other stuff. The SAC team is mostly there with an okay movie-original character. Mixing the geisha sequence from the first ep of SAC with the opening of the movie worked . The burning sequence from SAC 1st Season is there for little to no reason. Kuze gets grafted onto the Puppetmaster to make for a more Hollywood-esqe type plot. Some of the stuff they kept in was also weird. The diving sequence they kept in, and was nice actually, but there’s no weight to it. It’s… mostly internally consistent, but just kind of a mess too, if that makes sense.
The visuals were fortunately on point. But it made me realize something: This movie should've been made 10 years ago. One of the reasons the original GitS was a thing is because the action sequences weren't something you could do with live action at the time. And while a couple of the ones here are shot for shot (the river fight is still impressive, I'll admit), they just don't have that Oomph they should have because the effects are old hat at this point.
Beat Takeshi being the only one speaking Japanese is really fucking weird.
As for the twist... So they sort of lampshade the whole whitewashing thing with the Major by having her actual past be: She was a Japanese teenager named Motoko Kusanagi who ran away from home, and Hanka electronics was collecting runaways to experiment on. They gave her a completely different appearance, altered her memory to better camouflage what they've been doing. Which works in and of itself. Motoko Kusanagi isn't even her real name in the manga, but one given to her after the cyberization. It's officially unknown what her original name, race, or even gender was. Not sure if they did it in response to the controversy or what, but yeah. The real problems are still with the other characters in the movie. I guess that just goes to show how far it actually deviates. Same spirit, I guess. Just… not as good.
