Don‘t Let Your Life Get Stolen As You Watch the ‘Ghost in the Shell’ Super Bowl Spot
Ah, the Super Bowl: the one magical night each year in which the nation unites under the binding forces of domestic macrobrewed beer, buffalo chicken wings, and good ol’ American football. Everyone’s got something to enjoy at the big game, whether that’s the competition itself or, for those of us unable to enjoy sporting events due to PTSD over a childhood of getting picked last, trailers for a movie in which Scarlett Johansson plays a sexy police robot. The Super Bowl regularly doubles as the premiere for a handful of brand new previews of upcoming blockbusters, and Paramount has done us all the solid of giving us a three-day jump on the fun.
The new 30-second spot for Ghost in the Shell cycles through a flurry of imagery, mostly taken from earlier trailers. We see ScarJo as Major Motoko Kusanagi, an automaton programmed to defend a futuristic Japan from a technological threat. Clad in a skintight bodysuit, she leaps through a pane of glass and punches a man in a river. A geisha-masked figure morphs into some kind of creepy robot spider. Gigantic koi fish drifts through the air around a neon-festooned skyscraper. All is not well in weird future Japan, however — a mysterious figure informs Motoko that her government masters may not be as benevolent as they seem.
Not a whole lot of new material to pick over in this clip, so take it as an opportunity to consider the little beauties of life, that a single media-circus event can seamlessly unite the star quarterback and the anime nerd he used to shove into lockers.