Available for home viewing: "Ghost in the Shell"

Like the greatest screen goddesses, Scarlett Johansson rises above it all. In the thrill-free science-fiction thriller Ghost in the Shell, her character comes at you in pieces, emerging first during the opening credits in the form of a metallic skeleton. It’s a good look — it evokes the original Terminator — but soon the skeleton is being dipped like a chip in whitish goo. This technological soup gives the metallic frame a humanoid cladding, making it more reassuringly and pleasantly familiar, from bosomy top to round bottom. It looks like a giant dream Barbie, hairless pubis and all.

Enjoy these credits because they offer some of the more arresting, inventive images in this visually cluttered yet often disappointingly drab movie. A live-action version of a Japanese manga by Shirow Masamune, Ghost in the Shell is one of those future-shock stories that edges around the dystopian without going full-bore apocalyptic. To that end it is set in a possible future world that looks distant enough to seem exotic and familiar enough to seem plausible. The original manga takes place in what’s described as a "strange corporate conglomerate-state called ‘Japan,’" while this movie unwinds nowhere in particular, just a universal megalopolis filled with soaring gray towers.

Anyone who has seen Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner or that film’s innumerable 2.0 follow-ups (Strange Days, The Fifth Element) will recognize this Ghost cityscape, with its jumbled forms, neo-noir shadows, patina of art-directed decay and its conspicuous Asian-Hollywood fusion touches. Some of this tickles the eye, like the semi-translucent, pony-size koi fish that float through the air, seemingly just because they look cool. The koi don’t seem to be selling anything other than the movie’s production values and visual concept; elsewhere, enormous spectral human figures loom over buildings like embodied billboards, nicely evoking rampaging movie monsters of the past.

The most important leviathan, of course, is Johansson, whose mysterioso cyborg, Major, effortlessly slides right into this scene, with her preternaturally still face — often as blank as a mask — and the ports in the back of her neck that she uses to jack into cables and other characters. These artificial orifices are pleasingly mysterious and highly suggestive, at once creating a sense of human vulnerability and raising the possibility of the posthuman. Major occasionally stuffs goo in her ports and also uses them to plug into others. About the only part of her that’s human is her soul, or "ghost" in the story’s poetic parlance. The rest of Major is a bendable, mendable shell, which makes her well suited for hard-core tactical work with a police outfit known as Section 9.

As the title suggests, Ghost in the Shell is haunted, including by the original manga, its sequels and several excellent animated movies: the first, also titled Ghost in the Shell, and the entrancingly lovely Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, both directed by Mamoru Oshii. The new Ghost in the Shell was directed by Rupert Sanders, who has made commercials and one other feature, Snow White and the Huntsman. He likes a dark palette and is good with actors, but there’s little here that feels personal, and he mostly functions as a blockbuster traffic cop, managing all the busily moving, conspicuously pricey parts.

That’s too bad, especially because the original Ghost in the Shell is such a delightful philosophical plaything, with pleasures that simultaneously bewitch the eye and enchant the mind. This version, by contrast, ditches the original’s big, human, all-too-human questions, but keeps all the firing guns and car chases, the action clichés and intentional genre stereotypes. Stripped of its deeper-dish musings, the story turns into a perfectly watchable, somewhat bland action movie, tricked out with sharp details, some fine actors and one slumming legend, the director-actor Takeshi Kitano, who plays Aramaki, Major’s boss. He only speaks in Japanese; Major and almost everyone else speak in English.

The characters understand one another, presumably because they’re beyond mere language and, in any event, they sometimes communicate telepathically. At first, the fact that they can speak to one another comes across as an inventive flourish, but like so much in Ghost in the Shell — the toddling geishas, the Asian extras — it helps to reduce an entire culture to a decorative detail. The movie has been widely criticized for casting Johansson in a role that was, of course, originally Japanese, a decision that isn’t offset by an absurd narrative twist that seems to have been created to forestall criticism but will only provoke further ire. This isn’t just appropriation; it’s obliteration.