Movie Review: Johnny Mnemonic (1995)

The year is 2021 and the month is January. Keanu Reeves wakes up not knowing what a mobile phone is, and he hasn’t got a Facebook or IMDb profile... Do you think I just made that up? If so, then obviously you haven’t seen Johnny Mnemonic – a futuristic cyberpunk action thriller with screenplay written by William Gibson, the pioneer of cyberpunk genre, and based on Gibson's own short story, first published back in 1981.

The film itself was released in early Summer of 1995, and the reason why it would make an interesting watch today is to not just compare Gibson’s cyperpunk vision with the world we have today, but also to see how the version of today’s present looked like in a film made during the early days of the Internet – first half of 1990s, in other words; it’s 2021 with standard sci-fi effects of 90s before digital cameras and cgi porn were a thing. This is the part where I wonder whether the film today is good for laughs to the cast as well as the screenwriter; particularly if Ice-T and Keanu both can watch it while retaining fully serious faces. I guess this has never been the case with Dolph Lundgren (of Rocky IV and Universal Soldier fame) though, who plays a character called “The Street Preacher”, and is a proper priest in a cyberpunk world. With a question such as “do you need someone brought to Jesus, or to you?” when a boss of a megacorporation gives him his next assignment as an assassin, it’s doubtful his role was ever intended as a fully serious one. Same applies, I think, to Udo Kier (Suspiria, Feardotcom), who plays Ralfi – a bloke of certain stature in the world of data couriers; Johnny’s, played by Reeves, handler.

"We hold services nightly; you should join us.” The Street Preacher - Dolph Lundgren in Johnny Mnemonic. Source

While a good deal of props and sets in Johnny Mnemonic look like cyberpunk comics turned into a 90’s movie with a few Hollywood actors trying their best to navigate through scenery of skid row ruins and abandoned buildings, some of the tech part of it all is still exciting as a novelty today; and today more than ever at that. Ok, we don’t use brain implants with storage capacity of hundreds of gigabytes (for average person gigabyte was something rather intangible back in 1995), but we can carry that amount of data with us as a key fob, or Rubik’s Cube, for instance. Yet one of the most interesting parts in Johnny Mnemonic is the Internet, which in many ways looks like a version of today’s Metaverse. Back in the 90s it would have been impossible to create a cgi of today’s virtual reality, but, I think, the team of designers had done a great job with what they had at their disposal.
If the notion of Metaverse sounds a bit surprising here, dig on this: there is a widespread problem amongst poorer class in Johnny Mnemonic: “nerve attenuation syndrome” or NAS, which is caused by that same Internet mentioned above. The startling thing is: there is such a thing as FND in our actual world, which stands for Functional Neurological Syndrome, and as of yet it’s not fully explainable, but could possibly be linked to the use of Social Media on the Internet. (Source)

Apparently, Johnny Mnemonic was a directional debut by artist and photographer Robert Longo as far as feature films are concerned, and to this day it remains the only feature film he’d directed. I’m inclined to think that the fact it’s a debut partly explains why Keanu at times still looks like Ted who just happened to accidently say something else instead of “excellent!” (like “I want a cold Mexican beer!” for instance), while in The Matrix the Wachowskis seemed to have managed to bring Keanu more in tune with his inner guru, which in turn served well to Francis Lawrence years later, when making his directional debut with Constantine. In this sense, Johnny Mnemonic is, in my opinion, good for comparison to see what characters Keanu nails, and which ones not so much.

There’s Henry Rollins in Johnny Mnemonic as well. That’s the guy who, same as Ice-T (plays J-Bone), fits in a futuristic cyberpunk world created in 1990s perfectly. There is a scene, where his character Spider attempts to break a code to get to what’s in Johnny’s brain. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Henry Rollins being that much into something. I mean I’m sure those monitors there were really showing the progress of brain hacking.

Ice-T as J-Bone in Johnny Mnemonic. Source

I’m concluding this review with a suggestion that Johnny Mnemonic might have inspired The Fifth Element’s scene of opera singing with accompaniment of contemporary, trendy or just avant-garde music. There is a bar scene in Johnny Mnemonic where a singer, who looks like she could just easily be in some Star Wars installment, performs accompanied by metal rhythms and guitar riffs. I guess we still have to wait a bit for things like that being a new normal in pubs or bars.

Peer Ynt

A biomechanical dolphin - prop model from Johnny Mnemonic's set. Source