Johnny Mnemonic Review | Cyberpunk Sci-fi Action Movie 1995

Good mornin-afternoo-vening, dear Steemians and welcome to a cyberpunk-themed flashback to the mid ‘90s, with a movie you might have heard of, but never actually seen, called Johnny Mnemonic.

Since I’m taking the whole of September to play and review all the recent Shadowrun titles from Harebrained Schemes, I thought to spice things up a bit and review a cyberpunk-themed movie, since I also haven’t done a movie review in quite some time. Rest assured that I’ll be concluding Shadowrun September next week with the last title in the loose trilogy of Shadowrun games, but for today let’s focus on Johnny Mnemonic for awhile.

I saw this movie around two decades ago - so I was around 11 or 12 - that’s a lot of time for the brain to filter out most of the shit and save up only the fun and happy memories and Johnny Mnemonic is definitely worse than I remembered it.

The movie starts with an introductory text crawl telling us that it’s the future of 2021 - so let’s take a breather and talk about that a bit.

Usually, starting off a movie that doesn’t feature the words Star Wars prominently at the beginning, with a text crawl is a bad sign - and something that used to happen quite a bit in B-grade ‘80s and ‘90s movies, which in general is fine with me since it’s a potential sign of so-bad-it’s-good material, the types of movies I love to watch - but in this case it’s superfluous since much of that information is reflected later in the movie. Mind you, not in a very competent or world-building manner but still, the beginning text crawl really wasn’t necessary to set the stage of the dystopic future.

On the other hand, I do have to also take into consideration that writing this now - from the almost-dystopic future presented in the movie, maybe the movie-going audience of 1995 would need it, though on the other other hand - which if you’ve been keeping track, should be a third maybe robotic one - a competent filmmaker should be able to create the atmosphere with the medium of film itself, that’s why I’m watching a movie and not reading the short-story that this movie was based on, written by William Gibson.

Anywhoo, the movie features an incredible roster of actors, most of which becoming quite the names in various fields in the meanwhile.

It stars none other than a still very pre-Matrixy Keanu Reeves who proves that he was a really really bad actor and that his performance in the Matrix trilogy was actually an upgrade from his earlier work.

Then we have a virtual litany of secondary characters played by names and faces that you might recognize - starting with Dina Meyer as his bodyguard, who you may remember as playing Dizzy Flores in the first Starship Troopers - don’t tell me you’ve never watched that one or I’ll have to make a video about it as well.

Ice-T in one of his first forays onto the big screen, Dolph Lundgren in his last foray onto the big screen till the Expendables, a bit cameo-style part from none other than Takeshi Kitano, Henry Rollins as an underground doctor, Udo Kier being… Udo Kier pretty much, and a Yakuza goon wearing too much makeup and sporting a laser-wire thumb.

Before I get corrected about that last part - I am aware that the actual nomenclature is monomolecular wire however, while “monomolecular” looks great in print, “laser” sounds better when you say it out loud, also that’s the visual reference one has for what you see on screen so I’m running with laser wire.

Our protagonist, Johnny, is a data courier who transports information too sensitive to be sent via the net, in his head. Unlike the title’s movie, he doesn’t do this by employing some specific method of memorizing, instead relying on a cerebral implant.

Thanks to this nifty piece of brain-gear, he can store the mind-melting amount of 80 gigs - ok 160 gigs if he uses a doubler, in his brain. Considering that at the time - in 1995 - the average computer had around 500 megs of storage on their hard-drives, and they were just about getting to the one gig mark, you can kinda see why 80 gigs of data was an insane amount... oh how times have changed. Interesting side effect of this implant though - he has no memory of his childhood and he’s actually been saving his money in order to get the implant out and have his memories returned.

But much like it happens in the beginning of the Shadowrun games - things rarely are what they seem and Johnny has to take one last delivery job because the people performing the surgery upped their price for some unknown reason.

Also just like in Shadowrun games - or more to the point, most action movies - things go sideways fast and Johnny is off, on a time-sensitive quest to get the information out, before it melts his brain. That’s not the only thing that he has to contend with though, because the Yakuza is after his head as well, literally. In this world, the Yakuza are used as hired muscle by the megacorporations and they want to preserve the information for their clients who do not want his data to be retrieved by any other parties out there.

And that’s about all I’m going to say about the plot since honestly, there isn’t that much of it to really dig into. You can tell though, that there are quite a few interesting stories that could have been told because we do get some glimpses into the backstories of the various secondary characters, and at least some of these could have been quite compelling if they’d been competently made.

First of all, nothing is really made of his quest to get back his childhood memories. This is only served up as his motivation to take the job in the beginning, and it’s occasionally mentioned here and there as being important to him, but it is never explained why it is important. Nor is it explained why he got the implant to begin with, now using it just to get it removed.

Takeshi Kitano’s role is one that stems from a deep personal tragedy and it is related to the data that Johnny is carrying in his dome. Much more could have been done with his character, dealing with him finding that fact out and his reaction to it.

Similarly, Dolph Lundgren’s character is a cyber-enhanced street preacher who apparently uses religion as both a sort of front and a personal theme, albeit horribly twisted. It would’ve been quite interesting to see him actually play the role of a person preaching against self-augmentation as a means of maintaining the purity of the body and of the soul, while he does everything possible to keep himself as augmented as possible.

Then there’s the sort-of AI character, but not really. Her role turns out to be a sort of deus ex machina, but much more could have been done on her side of things, especially considering the amount of time Johnny spends with the virtual world headset on, gesticulating through the web.

Yeah, about that, it’s quite fun to see what the idea of future information technology was back in the mid ‘90s. Although I have to say that the virtual world effects, for the time, are not all bad. If you look at the overall aesthetic as an abstractization rather than compare it with current capabilities, it more than passes.

After rewatching this in the present of 2017, I still cannot explain how the hell Keanu Reeves continued his career as a lead or a co-lead, because his acting in this is stiff, bland and generally bad. The one scene where he was probably told that Johnny is having a mental breakdown, he overacts and hams it up to an insane degree going from being enraged into bad comedy. Also the director had this thing of showing a lot of close-up shots of his face - especially at the beginning. Probably trying to give the viewers the impression that they’re having a video chat with his character, which might’ve worked better back in 1995 than it does now. Even taking this into consideration the first half of the movie is altogether just badly cut, it’s very disjointed and the dialogue and interactions between the characters in general feel very off.

But since I’m talking about Johnny Mnemonic as part of Shadowrun September, how does the movie fare in terms of portraying the cyberpunk aesthetic and theme?

It’s kind of ok, I mean at least they tried, in terms of costumes and various gadgets and gizmos around the world. The movie does do its best to give off the impression of highly advanced technology, with mini-discs, portable printers and fax machines included in landline phones. They also tried a bit to portray some dystopic contrast, between the rioting mobs outside and the quiet opulent luxury of the hotel, but it’s in general too little and too superficial to really make any sort of impact. The whole setting just looks like Detroit, or replace with “the bad side of whatever town you live in”.

Johnny Mnemonic was supposed to be the first piece of media to break cyberpunk into the mainstream, but unfortunately it only showcased how poorly understood the concept was, in the mainstream, and as such the result is laughably weak.

Could it have been better? Yes, definitely, as I mentioned earlier. It wasn’t even an issue of budget either, it all boils down to the type of movie you want to make and whether or not you’re technically capable of doing it.

And while looking into the behind of the scenes of the making of the movie, it turns out that the director and the writer of the original story who also wrote the movie’s screenplay, were initially looking to make a low-budget art film, which I can totally see this working. A very character or atmosphere-driven thing. The setting lends itself to that sort of artistic expression or discussion.

But that initial pitch failed to get financing and somehow graduated to a 30-million dollar budget. And with that sort of a budget - which is quite decent even for today’s standards - there came lots of notes and directions meant to push the movie into the mainstream.

According to William Gibson, the movie was recut during the last month of pre-release and “it went from being a very funny, very alternative piece of work to being something that had been very unsuccessfully chopped and cut into something more mainstream.”

Well, looking at the finished product one can see signs of these sort of compromises and interference, especially in the choppy editing of the first half, but there is almost nothing directly funny in the movie and nothing really alternative either, at least not in what we get to see.

But the main problem I had with re-watching Johnny Mnemonic in the present of 2017 was that... it wasn’t even so bad it’s good territory - I was prepared for it to be different than what I remembered it being, but not like this - it’s just an incompetently written and directed movie, simple as that. Regardless of what the initial goal, script or intention was, what we have is the end product, and it is a poorly-made one. Normally I suggest you watch bad movies because they’re hella entertaining, at least to me, but not this time sorry, skip this one.

Thank you for reading, let me know your thoughts about Johnny Mnemonic, have you seen it? What did you think? Would you watch it now? I’m curious to know.

Until next week when I’ll be diving into the last entry of this cyberpunk-themed month, Shadowrun: Hong Kong, have a nice day chummers and keep your chrome shiny!

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