Movie Details
| Title: | Johnny Mnemonic | |
| Director: | Robert Longo | |
| Year: | 1995 | |
| Genre: | Science Fiction | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 09.06.25 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (0)
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 09.06.25 | Internet | I recently finished playing through the video game Cyberpunk 2077. I waited five years to play it because it was supposedly very buggy at launch and I wanted to give it its best possible shot. It's based on the tabletop role playing game Cyberpunk, which I played a tiny bit of back in high school, so I knew I was a fan of the property and didn't want it to suck. Well, over 300 hours later, I can definitively say that the game doesn't suck. It's still not without bugs but they are far above the threshold of maintaining immersion and enjoying the game as a piece of entertainment and, dare I say, art. In the game, you steal an experimental biochip called the relic from the president of a megacorp and witness his death at the hands of his son in the process. Soon, trying to get away, you're shot in the head only to be resurrected by corpo goons, ripperdocs, and the relic itself which held an imprinted personality of an anti-corpo activist and rockerboy named Johnny Silverhand who died fifty years ago after setting off a nuclear bomb in a corporation's headquarters tower. In the game, Johnny Silverhand is voiced by and modelled to resemble Keanu Reeves. Why was Keanu Reeves the best most fitting perfect casting for Johnny Silverhand? Not just because of The Matrix trilogy or more recently John Wick but also because, way back in the mid 90s when cyberpunk was all the rage, Keanu starred in this movie. Here he plays a character named Johnny: a data courier / smuggler that stores sensitive data in a chip embedded in his brain. He takes on a client whose data size exceeds his capacity, thus overloading his implant and setting the data to seep into his synapses, signing his own death warrant unless he can download the data before his brain is fried. However, the data, encrypted by stegonography using random images taken from TV during the upload, proves to be stolen from megacorp Pharmakom, who employs the the Yakuza to retrieve it, although just Johnny's head will do. Johnny Mnemonic comes from author William Gibson, of Neuromancer fame and generally considered the father of the genre. I think he wrote most of his stuff in the 80s along with archetypal blueprints like Blade Runner (and Akira in Japan) but the genre exploded (to my mind) in the early to mid 90s as the Internet entered global consciousness. It also happened to coincide with technologically-driven industrial rock groups like Nine Inch Nails and early CG in film with movies like Terminator 2 causing a wave of sci-fi infused genre movies sold on cyber spectacle and fueled by treated guitars. Stuff like Total Recall, Robocop, "Stephen Kings" The Lawnmower Man, Freejack, Demolition Man, and personal favorite Hardware. Along with this movie, 1995 alone had early Denzel Washington Russel Crowe thriller Virtuosity, Stallone's take on Judge Dredd and Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days. If you know me or have been reading this journal for a while, you'll know these were my prime high school years. I was into all the bands, was into computers, read WiReD magazine, had an early internet account, you name it. It's hard to look back and remember the excitement for the future that my generation had back then when everything felt new and progressive and forward-looking. Of course, so much of the entertainment was immediately pessimistic, presenting dystopian visions of what this limitless future could be, but that was all just fun fodder for imaginative thought... right? The genre probably peaked with The Matrix, and as we all know it's been a downhill slide in almost all aspects of life since 9/11. So, on the heels of completing what is now one of my all-time favorite games, it got me in a mood to revisit some of these formative properties. The game really does an excellent job pulling from all these source materials. The Akira motorcycle's in there, you can wield a katana just like Hiro Protagonist from Snow Crash, when it rains people pull out their Blade Runner neon-light umbrellas, etc. Spending time in that future world as someone who grew up in the 90s feels nostalgic. What did the game take from this movie? Well, Udo Kier's character is a lot like the various Fixers that Cyberpunk 2077's V deals with. He can also get outfitted with a monofilament exactly like what's seen in this film. Dolph Lundgren's cyberpsycho stuffed to the gills with enough implants to drive him insane, gangs of enhanced badass gorgeous women like Dina Meyer, Japanese corpo giants like Beat Takeshi's character, ripperdocs like Henry Rollins' character, ghosts in the machine like Marbara Sukowa's character, all are represented in game. There's no anarcho-luddite contingent led by Ice-T dressed as Al Jourgensen (unless you count Silverhand himself) and no navy-jacked sub-killer hacker dolphin, but did I mention the central plot of the game with the brain chip and whatnot? So... watching this again feels like a vital inspiration for the game, and perhaps because the game's still so fresh in my mind I was able to see past the limitations of this movie and vibe with the world and concept. I definitely remember walking out of the theater when I saw it on release dismissing it as cheesy pap, and it's true that a lot of the effects don't hold up by any stretch of the imagination, and Keanu's performance here (as with about half the cast I'd say) is too broad. But maybe that's partly "90s extreme" seen in 2025 eyes? Who knows. What I do know is I feel like imdb's 5.6 rating is fair but I enjoyed this way more than I thought I would and way more than I did back in 1995. Again, maybe it's because the video game presented the vision of the future this movie hints at. You can run around in that world that looks and feels almost exactly how this movie should've felt, but which was an impossibility at the time. As Henry Rollins is scanning Keanu's brain, he's looking at a fucking oscilloscope as if it were a terminal monitor. Even if the filmmakers had a thousand CRT screens and mini-discs and blacked-out goggles, Ice-T still couldn't help but reference VCRs in his final speech. And now, 30 years later, that retro-futurism strikes closer to its 70s and 80s variants than failed attempts at authenticity. I give it all a total pass now. What I do wish for is some better filmmaking. Reading the imdb trivia section, it seems like music video director Richard Longo's original vision was something much more experimental, but since he couldn't raise the 1.5 million for that he settled for the 30 million action blockbuster follow-up to Speed. All the bullshit gunplay and explosions stretch the film's budget and make everything look cheaper and weighs the last act down big time. It's also true that Keanu's performance just doesn't hit. Neither does Dolph's techno-jesus. Both actors were not exactly known for their nuance at the time but I had a much smoother time revisitng Speed last year. I think this is one of the performances that reinforced his reputation as a bad actor that persisted through The Matrix. Beat Takeshi I give a pass since he's mostly acting in English. The trivia mentioned a longer Japanese cut that features more of him that might change my mind. Udo Kier delivers, but I surprisingly found Henry Rollins and Ice-T to be stand-outs. Rollins in particular delivers some BS techno-babble with tired familiarity that I believed, and Ice-T doesn't do too much more than stand there and act tough but he doesn't stand out as terrible to me. Dina Meyer's a little rough around the edges but this is her first part. So this trend might continue in the following days. I definitely want to revisit Strange Days as I remember being very disappointed by that, and I might check out some other Cyberpunk stuff too if the mood holds. There probably won't be more essay-length notes like this but this was also me wanting a place to put my thoughts about the video game on paper since I don't have a VG journal. If you're like me and find yourself hungry for some lesser-seen cyberpunk content, you might do worse than digging this up. |
