Ghost in the Shell

Major Motoko Kusanagi is a cyborg police officer in a future where the boundary between human consciousness and networked information has dissolved almost completely. She is hunting a hacker called the Puppet Master who hijacks human nervous systems through their cybernetic implants. She is also asking, quietly and persistently, whether she has a ghost - whether there is a self inside the shell that makes her something rather than a very sophisticated nothing.

Mamoru Oshii directed this in 1995. The Wachowskis watched it before making The Matrix. James Cameron cited it. The opening sequence - Kusanagi assembling herself above a rain-soaked city, the thermoptic camouflage dissolving her into the skyline - remains one of the most technically and philosophically precise images in the medium. The Kenji Kawai score treats the future as an ancient thing.

The philosophy is not window dressing. It is the film. What constitutes identity when memory can be fabricated and the body is optional? What is the difference between a ghost and a program sophisticated enough to believe it has one? Ghost in the Shell asks these questions in 1995 and does not answer them, because the correct answer is that they cannot be answered, and a film that understood that was always going to outlast every film that pretended otherwise.