*promote

I'll hold judgement until I see the final movie itself. While I was initially disturbed they recast her race, this is far in the future and one would think races are more spread evenly, so I'll give them a pass on the "whitewash". It looks like it got the look/feel of the original anime. If this works out, hopefully Akira can be done with a proper treatment (though that one is a bit harder to realize in live action).

EDIT: Typical click bait story ending, "tell us how you feel about the whitewashing of the movie in the comments below".

Self promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Sunday, November 13th, 2016 4:24am PST - promote requested by original submitter RFlagg.

I know the story for this movie is more based on the anime series, more than the anime movie... but god damn... there's so many iconic scenes from the first movie in this trailer... Love it.

*quality

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by Zawash.

Uhm, nope. The far future is most likely to have less caucasians than today. The genes for darker skin color and asian facial features tend to be rather dominant. Also, white people are already outnumbered on this planet. Which is great, cause they're really shitty to everybody else.

It's ok, VFX will just make her more Asian

Love the visuals, but it takes a real American writer to shoe-horn the Robocop story into an already interesting narrative. Lame.

Japanese opinions on "white washing" the character https://youtu.be/2DhoBuU1Dtc

That is a super fascinating youtube channel right there. Thanks, dude!
I love to hear the opinion of japanese people on this. It's very unexpected and interesting. Really changed my perspective a bit.

What I find interesting is that modern manga evolved post WW2 and took a lot of influence from American comics brought to Japan by GIs . Characters in manga often don't really look asian, their faces are, if anything, exaggerations of western beauty ideals. If you did see flatter faces and almond shaped eyes it was often the face of a villain or fool. That said, Motoko is unquestionably Japanese, I think its a shame they didn't cast an Asian actress for the roll... but I guess in the end this is a western movie, made predominantly by westerners in English. It's cultural appropriation. Is it theft or flattery? Does Ghost in the Shell belong first to the Japanese, or does it belong as much to its western fans?

I just hope it doesn't suck

also Scarlett is nice to look at regardless.

Now I see how the dealt with the casting/ethnicity issue. She's now "The Major", as opposed to Maj. Motoko Kusanagi.

Lot's of familiar scenes there, for those who've seen the original Animé, at least.

Are you implying that white people are shitty to everyone else because they are white? Or is it less about skin color and more about how a dominant culture/race treats and mistreats others?
No matter which group is currently dominant, power always corrupts.

@Jinx
I'm not sure you could call this cultural misappropriation, I'm pretty sure GITS is owned by a Japanese company and sold the movie rights to Hollywood. And the credits will still feature the name of GITS's creator, Masamune Shirow, a Japanese man. So white people are not taking credit for something they didn't create.

People say they want to see more cultural diversity but they start throwing fits whenever someone uses a cultural element in their work and they themselves are not from that culture.
I see a world where older cultures are gradually going to mix together and become newer ones, this to me, is inevitable; and I look forward to the day where we can simply enjoy good works without all the moral hand wringing.

As for the trailer itself, I think it looks better than what little I've seen before. Although I am not sure I like some of the turns they are taking in the story that this trailer seems to imply. The first of her kind? I seem to recall there were lots of people like her in the mangas and the anime.

I'm going to be crossing my fingers in hopes that this is good. At least with what we got for this preview, it looks promising and people have been commending how the beginning of GITS did look to be emulated here too.

I just hope that we finally have a decent adaptation on our hands. Hell knows that if we ever need to start identifying bad films, we use "white washing" to start finding them. (Why are there white kids in the Antarctic shyamalan?!)

Well, if anything it introduces GITS to the newbs... I know so many kids in their early 20's that have never even heard of it; maybe it will inspire them to go dig some good shit up.

We always crave new, but the past is riddled with cavernous halls intertwined with crystals & gems.

loved the anime. why can't it stay as a anime.

Are you familiar with Zheng He? He led expeditions to east Africa in the early 1400s. Nobody in east Africa speaks chinese.
Of course you know Christopher Columbus. All of south America speaks spanish now. With the exception of Brazil, they speak portuguese thanks to some Pope, if I remember correctly.
That's what I'm talking about.
It's not the genes, it's not even the corruptive nature of power, it is culture. European culture. The only way we started to begin to understand the error of our ways was to wage two catastrophic wars against each other that destroyed our continent to an unseen extent. Sadly, we exported that toxic element of our culture to another continent. Just look at recent elections.

And in regards to the whitewashing of this IP, well, Hollywood doesn't trust its audience to embrace a more colorful world. It's gotten better but it's still a long way to go. At least we're going there. I just wish we'd hurry up a bit. I'm still baffeled about that Airbender movie and how they fucked up casting that so badly.
I like Johansson but she makes as much sense in that role as a black James Bond. It one of the things that make me hope the movie is good despite of it.

Japanese people don't care that the actress is not Japanese. The original creators don't care that the actress is not Japanese. Does no one else see the terrible irony that the people complaining loudest about Scarlett Johansson being cast in this role are mostly privileged white people?

I'd be curious if these same people complained about Tom Cruise being the lead in Edge of Tomorrow or Justin Chatwin playing Goku in the 2009 Dragonball movie. And I'd be more curious to hear what Asian box office star should have been cast in these roles to attract the audiences these movies needed to recoup their production costs.

Sure, Mr. and Ms. educated liberal-progressive might go to see these movies even if they are cast with relatively unknown Asian actors but would that be enough to justify production of the movie in the first place?

This movie is an ADAPTATION. Adaptations are not supposed to be literal translations of the source material. What would be the point in that? I don't think a lot of people who watched the Lord of the Rings films, for instance, could have stomached being bombarded for minutes at a time with bad poetry by Tom Bombadil.

They made the right decision on this film. In this case, people who know nothing about anime are going to show up for this movie just to watch Johansson kick ass. And if they like it a lot they are going to be interested in learning more about the original source material, in which case they'll obtain a lot more Japanese cultural knowledge than they would if some "Asian-looking" person had been cast in the role in the first place.

Whether this movie will actually be any good or not... it's really impossible to tell from this trailer.

Never heard of him before now, but even in Chinese history records of his voyages were scattered or omitted, due in part possibly because his voyages went against the wishes of a previous ruler. He made seven voyages between 1405 and 1433, the Wikipedia article mentions nothing about colonization efforts so that's probably why East Africa doesn't speak Chinese.
On the other side we have Christopher Columbus who was in all the history books here in America and was regularly celebrated. Until we got more honest with our history, now it's Indigenous People's Day in many places (That Italian Asshole Day just doesn't look as good on a calendar I guess).
If the Chinese had taken over the world then maybe we would be reading about someone else discovering the Americas (and probably called something else too) but as it stands Europeans did and that's who winds up in the history books.

So European culture is to blame for all this? You 'll have to be more specific, what have the Europeans done that nobody else have managed to do?

As far Johansson's role in the movie goes, I can take her or leave her really, they could have cast an Asian action star and I would have been fine with that. But the choice of Johansson was less about nerds like me and more about getting everyone else into the theater. Oh, and I think Idris Elba would make an awesome James Bond, just sayin.

You're kidding, right?
Do I have to make a list? On every continent white people visited (if you can call showing up and not really leaving a visit) we fucked up the lives of a good portion of the people living there.
Sure, mankind has always been cruel, in every corner of the earth. However, white people are to murder, theft and slavery what Coca Cola is to refreshing diabeeetus (yes, that's how it's spelled). A fucking international enterprise whose traces can be found everywhere. On every fucking continent.
I hope we can agree on that. Otherwise, here's a short list: Gippsland Massacres, Nagasaki, Opium Wars, My Lai Massacre, fucking Iraq, Crusades, Apartheid, Herero and Namaqua genocide, that whole Columbus mess, Trail Of Tears and transatlantic slave trade (because why the fuck not?). Oh, my bad, I forgot the freaking Holocaust and starting 2 World Wars.
Who does this? Who? White people, that's who. Europeans and their descendants.
Would you like to argue that level of evil is genetic? I won't.
It's cultural. We europeans (and later our emigrated offspring) always thought we're better than everybody else, we had god on our side (and the Pope agreed!). Probably a leftover from the Roman Empire. And that's why everywhere we go, we steal, murder or occupy the shit out of every place. No other collection of ethnic groups has so much blood on their hands and it's not because we're worse DNA constructs than the others. All humans are capable of evil, it just takes a certain way of thinking to go that far.
Thankfully, we wrecked our own continent so badly during WW2, that we finally started to improve our ways. But here's the problem: we just started. We're far from being done.
Orban, LePen, Farage, Putin, Petry and last but not least Trump.

Oh, and black James Bond makes no freaking sense. He's a guy from a very old scottish family. How much awkward retconning are you willing to do for that? Jane Bond makes more sense than this.
Why can't we have a kickass 005 for a change? There are other agents working for MI-6 too. Maybe some awesome guy from London.
It's like Chow Yun Fat as King Arthur or Chewitel Ejiofor as Frodo Baggins.

I would say that Stalin, the Kin Jong's, Various African Tribal Genocides, and Pol Pot might disagree with your account of wholesale slaughter being reserved for the 'white' Europeans and their descendants. That is just to name a few. Also, what is a 'white' European? I mean the southern Europeans have quite a bit of Moorish blood in them, do they still count as 'white'?

All sarcasm aside, your argument is extremely flawed. Conquerors tend to lay waste to the societies they conquer, not always in terms of total lives lost, but in terms of cultural death. The reason why 'white' people are vilified for this lately is because for the past several hundred years they have been the ones expanding and taking over the regions you speak of. This is not exclusive to a skin color or originating locale, it is absolutely a core of our human nature.

I gave some examples earlier of non-European conquerors, but they are fairly recent. If we look in history at other groups, we find the same meme. The Steppe Horse Tribes were BRUTAL to cities and countries that did not capitulate. Look up "Measuring against the linchpin". That saying came from the fact that if you resisted Mongol rule, they would slaughter every male taller than the linchpin of a wagon wheel. The Aztecs and Mayans ruled southern American empires through great brutality, including human sacrifice for 'religious' purposes. Recent discoveries even indicate that it was considered a good omen if the sacrifices were crying in pain before they were to die. Remains recently found showed "All shared one feature: serious cavities, abscesses or bone infections painful enough to make them cry."

Slavery originated as early as human recorded history, if not sooner. Slavery can be traced back to the earliest records, such as the Code of Hammurabi (c. 1760 BC), which refers to it as an established institution. Slavery is rare among hunter-gatherer populations. Mass slavery requires economic surpluses and a high population density to be viable. Although slavery in some form or another existed in most European countries, it wasn't until after contact with the Arabic African slave traders that it soared in the 15th and 16th centuries.

tl;dr

You are referring to recent history to make an example while completely ignoring THOUSANDS of years of similar history. All humanity is flawed, narrowing it down to a singular group with cherry picked data is not going to persuade anyone with a brain.

Most movie goers probably don't even know he's from an old Scottish family, actually, I didn't even know that until just now. (Black Scotsmen should never be taken lightly however.)
As I understand it, 007 is a designation and could be assigned to anyone. Besides, if we went with your idea, which isn't necessarily a bad one, you just know someone would still complain that it implied that a black man isn't good enough to be 007. Chow Yun Fat as King Arthur? Can we get the Green Destiny to stand in for Excalibur?

@Mordhaus, you're not understanding the point I'm making here. I didn't say mankind in general isn't shitty to each other, it is very much. What I'm talking about is how as soon as Europe reached a technological tipping point (gaining an advantage), we started to fuck with every continent on the map. Our culuture shaped how we treated the rest of the world, which meant wiping out every other culture we could dominate.
Look at the Mongols, sure, extremely violent assholes. But what happened to those that didn't oppose them? Did they try to eradicate conquered cultures? Here's the funny part, the Mongols we're known for their religious tolerance. They didn't give a shit about your culture, as long as you surrendered and accepted their rule, you had a chance to be ok. Basically, the Mongols are Negan.
Say, what happened to those cultures that came into contact with the spanish Empire or the british? Oh right, we pretty much destroyed them as well as we could. We did this in the Americas, Africa and tried it in Australia. Europeans aren't Negan, they're the Wolves.
That's why I mention Zheng He. He shows up in Africa with a giant fleet and says "Gimme some of your shit!" and fucks off right home. Comes back a couple off times and the new chinese Emperor goes "Eh, it ain't worth it!"
I'm sure ol' Zheng could be quite the bastard but he didn't set up shop in Africa and he didn't start slaughtering people because they refused to embrace Buddha.
You're absolutely right, there are mad men to be found everywhere, there's genocide and slavery all around the globe all through human history. However, there's only one group of people that made all of it an export article. Our ancestors left their neighbourhood to mess up everybody else's. We're special in that regard.
With the exception of the Mongols of course. But they've always been exceptional. I mean, they're the only empire to successfuly invade Afghanistan. You gotta respect that.

That's a fan theory that explains why James Bond isn't the same guy all the time (Connery, Brosnan, Moore etc.) and kept spying around from the late 60's until now. The idea is that 'James Bond' is a cover identity used by various Agents of MI-6. This would allow for a black Bond but it isn't canon at all. That's why the Craig Bonds rebooted the franchise to allow the reuse of characters (Blofeld) and storylines (Vesper Lind vs. Tracy Bond).
007 is James Bond. The Producers are very protective in regards to this. However, the other 00-agents are pretty much non-existant in the franchise. They showed up in 'From Russia With Love' in a short meeting scene (sans dialogue), 009 died in the first 5 minutes of Octopussy (sans dialogue). The notable exception is Alec Trevelyan played by Sean Bean (I think he was 006), the villian from 'GoldenEye'. You could ague that Javier Bradem's Silva from 'Skyfall' must've been a 00-Agent but it is AFAIK not confirmed. Oh, and another 00-Agent was mentioned in 'Spectre'.
The reason Bond was made a scott was because Fleming like Connery's portrayal so much even though he was against casting him in the beginning. Bond's heritage is a minor plot point (more of a trivia item actually) in 'OHMSS' and a major plot point in 'Skyfall' (the name of Bond's family home).
As I said, gender-swapping Bond is much easier.