‘The Ghost in the Shell’ series review: Science SARU’s sprightly cyberpunk adaptation gives Shirow’s ghost a freshly minted shell

We have spent the better part of four decades catching up with The Ghost in the Shell . With our current AI-saturated, post-capitalist dystopia steadily graduating from speculative fiction into lived experience, the seminal cyberpunk series couldn’t have picked a more felicitous moment to return. Masamune Shirow’s 1989 manga had the prescience to make technological upheaval feel almost mundane, imagining a future where cyberisation has become so commonplace that even the most radical alterations to the human body barely register as remarkable. Mamoru Oshii’s subsequent Production I.G. film distilled that premise from Shirow’s famously information-clotted pages into a severe, hypnotically cerebral landmark, leaving its fingerprints all over The Matrix and Cyberpunk 2077 . Science SARU now circles back to Shirow, brushing aside some of the franchise’s accumulated solemnity to recover the manga’s perversity and unruly imagination.