I arrived at the Tweed City Cinema to be confronted by a sign that read ‘due to the dangerous weather conditions, our last screening today will be at 2.30pm’. Unfortunately, this movie was on at 1.30. It is, like so much else that is being churned out by the masters of CGI who now rule the roost, a pervy fest of violence as porn with a faux naked Scarlett Johansson shooting people with lustful abandon. Lifted from a Manga ‘classic’ (the Japanese always do kinky stuff a bit kinkier than Hollywood), it is set in the not-too-distant future, when science is capable of reconstructing, by cyber enhancement, damaged humans and then employing them as superior, virtually invincible warriors in the fight against terrorism. Major Mira Killian (Johansson) is the femme formidable. The line between man and robot is one that will increasingly become blurred, one suspects, in more and more sci-fi stories (and in real life? Shudder). Visually this is nothing short of stunning – especially the sequence in which the Major’s creation is detailed – but the complexity of the narrative, the brain strain of it, is strictly for fans of the far-out. And, ironically, it is the gorgeous eye-fest that tends to overwhelm the single most intriguing idea that director Rupert Sanders wants to deal with: that of our own individuality. The Major understands that she has been programmed, but she also comes around to realising that there is something else within her, something that she has not been told about. Action always takes precedence when filmmakers are catering to modern audiences (it’s an out-of-control spiral), meaning that the philosophical subtleties that might emerge in a movie such as this are never given enough time or air to breathe. Strangely soporific and, in the end empty, I couldn’t help feeling that my lack of knowledge of the Manga source made it not so much unintelligible as uninteresting – apart from the intensely chilling view of where technology is taking us.
