What a view | Netflix returns to Ghost in the Shell with new Japanese anime series

Welcome to your future, maybe. Not many years hence, the implacable posthumans are visiting anarchy on society while the superpowers of the day conduct a continuous war provoked by general economic meltdown.

In Japan, however, the fightback is on in Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045. Hope amid the bullets and bombs comes from law-enforcement division Public Security Section 9, whose star agent, Major Motoko Kusanagi, is a cybernetic, enhanced human with looks to match her intellectual and physical prowess (which might explain why Scarlett Johansson played the role in the 2017 live-action movie, in which Wellington, New Zealand, doubled for Hong Kong).

Based on Shirow Masamune’s Ghost in the Shell manga and 1995 cult anime film adaptation, this second Netflix series, like its predecessor, might still resemble a video game in its graphics, but that does nothing to derail the shoot-’em-up, mind-hacking action or, however bizarrely, viewers’ identification with the good guys (or good semi-synthetics).

Which brings us to the question of “engineering”: at what point does a being lose its “human” classification and pass the tipping point into becoming a product? At 51 per cent implanted cyberware? And then, who’s pulling their electronic strings?

As for identifying the real bad guys: it doesn’t take long for Section 9 to discover that an operative with a Russian-sounding name has been killed by polonium poisoning by his own government, which is a straight lift from the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006.

And although that might seem like handy timing in view of the desecration of Ukraine, the big, bad “American Empire” is also called to account here as it becomes clear that the National Security Agency is responsible for certain dodgy types of artificial intelligence ripe for military application.