Ghost In The Shell movie: The film version of the popular manga has started shooting, and Michael Pitt has joined the cast.
The Ghost In The Shell movie has started shooting. The big-screen version of the Manga series is being brought to the screen by Snow White and the Huntsman director Rupert Sanders, and will star Scarlett Johansson as a special-ops cyborg who is part of a task force named Section 9 that deals in the most dangerous criminals and extremists.
In more casting news, Michael Pitt, an alumni from Boardwalk Empire and the Hannibal TV series, has joined the film and will play its villain. He will play the character of The Laughing Man in the Ghost In The Shell movie, a part that The Hollywood Reporter describes as an ‘antagonist [who is] is a bitter and vengeful man with a body that is part robot.’
Michael Pitt
Jonathan Herman wrote the script for the Ghost In The Shell movie, and Avi Arad and Steven Paul are producing.
The film is based on the Manga series that is described in a bit more detail over at WikiPedia.
Primarily set in the mid-twenty-first century in the fictional Japanese city of Niihama, otherwise known as New Port City, the manga and the many anime adaptations follow the members of Public Security Section 9, a special-operations task-force made up of former military officers and police detectives. Political intrigue and counter-terrorism operations are standard fare for Section 9, but the various actions of corrupt officials, companies, and cyber-criminals in each scenario are unique and require the diverse skills of Section 9’s staff to prevent a series of incidents from escalating.
In this cyberpunk iteration of a possible future, computer technology has advanced to the point that many members of the public possess cyberbrains, technology that allows them to interface their biological brain with various networks. The level of cyberization varies from simple minimal interfaces to almost complete replacement of the brain with cybernetic parts, in cases of severe trauma. This can also be combined with various levels of prostheses, with a fully prosthetic body enabling a person to become a cyborg. The heroine of Ghost in the Shell, Major Motoko Kusanagi, is such a cyborg, having had a terrible accident befall her as a child that ultimately required that she use a full-body prosthesis to house her cyberbrain. This high level of cyberization, however, opens the brain up to attacks from highly skilled hackers, with the most dangerous being those who will hack a person to bend to their whims.
The Ghost In The Shell movie has a release date set for March 17, 2016.
