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However, Marshall's film does not only aim to document animal rights activism but also to propagate it, and in that it is less successful. This is a film overflowing with passion and compassion but often lacking the intellectual detachment necessary to distill conviction into a rigorous argument. "The Ghosts in Our Machine" is so convinced of its beliefs it doesn't really try to persuade you of them. It just assumes you'll agree.

We hear at the start of the film that the struggle for animal rights is the 21st Century equivalent to the struggle for civil rights in the 1960s but this idea is not cogently developed. Some of the film's best sections deal with the importance of the adoption by ordinary citizens of animals that have been used in tests or intensive farming. A later scene tells us that all animals should be granted rights equal to humans and that no being should be allowed to own another, meaning that just as humans should not own other humans as slaves, we should also not own animals as pets.