Makoto is a full body cyborg. By the second film it is implied she's nothing but a presence on the internet, hence "ghost". Her body looks like whatever body she's using at the time, and as I far as I'm aware, the only thing about her original body she cared about was it's ability to be a distraction. She spends a good chunk of the original film questioning whether she was ever human in the first place.
i think its because of the face outline, hair, and slender body... because you know.. westerns be fat. definitely cant be a Caucasian female because shes not fat and or holding a starbucks XL latte.
That is my biggest concern. Not that I have an issue with changes to streamline a movie for general audiences (why film makers feel they have to dumb down any large budget plot is beyond me. People are better than that, but that is another discussion for another time) but seriously...hasn't this "generic evil-shadow-organization-doing-unethical-medical-experiments plot" thing been done to death already?
Make sure you watch the original movie first. Watching the sequal or any of the series' will just screw it up for you.
You know Japanese have done multiple musical shows based on animes, from sailor moon, dragon ball, bleach, naruto, death note. surprised Ghost in the shell doesnt have one.
I'd be hard pressed to name a dozen anime where the characters actually appear Asian at all. Granted the BESM archetype makes it rather difficult to provide the stereotypical facial features, but aside from clothing and sometimes skin color most anime characters don't really have any distinctive features to qualify them as a specific racial type. Generally when they do it's because they're intentionally drawn that way to point out that they're -not- the same as everyone else, regardless of what everyone else is supposed to be.