I’ve been seeing lot of ads for the new Cyberpunk 2077 expansion, and while films and games are making the genre cool again, I cannot forget a mid-90s sci-fi schlockfest that showed how absolutely crazy cyberpunk can be.
You want hitmen with laser whips coming out of their thumbs? You want 90s rappers throwing flaming cars at the Yakuza? You want to see VR landscapes that look like they were made on a Nintendo 64?
Sci-fi fans everywhere, I give you Johnny Mnemonic (1995).
Set in the distant, futuristic world of 2021, the story follows the aforementioned Johnny, an information smuggler who has to use his own hardwired brain to smuggle a black-market data across state lines. Unable to turn down the job, Johnny’s hard drive is maxed out with stolen pharmaceutical data, and his brain will burn out in 24 hours unless he can find the download password, all while fighting off Big Pharma’s assassins.
Obviously, this is all meant to be fanciful speculation on the part of the writers. I mean, who would believe that 2021 was a world suffering from a global pandemic, paralysed by corrupt politicians and the massive wealth inequality caused by global corporate rule…. Wait a minute….
I’ve always loved the blocky, brutal look of 80s/90s technology, and this film assumed that in 2021, we’d be turning up that dial to 11. Everything is grimy, cheap and chunky, and Johnny Mnemonic is weirdly full of hi-tech/low-tech anachronisms, like a VR headsets being used to make phone calls while people are still using CDs and VHS tapes. As a side note, Johnny’s hyper-advanced wetware memory system can take a staggering 80 gigs of memory! I literally have children’s toys with more storage.
Johnny’s memory implants have come with a price; he cannot remember his childhood. He is looking for the final big payout so he can recover his memories and retire from the grimy, seedy underbelly of hi-tech poverty. Along for the ride are Jade, a bodyguard with a heart of gold and a body suffering from the plague, and J-Bone, a cyberpunk… punk, who spends his days hacking garbled messages into corporate media streams. A shout-out goes to 90s punk rocker Henry Rollins, who plays a surprisingly down-to earth doctor who keeps telling everyone that the cure for the global electromagnetic nerve dystrophy is “turn off the tv and get some sunshine, nerd.”
The film suffers from a lot of problems. The dialogue is just awful, and Keanu is sleepwalking his way through most of it. I think he was going for “restrained,” but what we got was more “zombie.” The film is also so in love with its bizarre cyberpunk setting that it keeps pushing the action forward, and several moments of significant character development never get any time to breathe. A lot of the second half of the film is mindless busywork, giving the characters things to chase while the bad guys can catch up, and several characters could have been cut entirely to slim down the bloat.
When it came out, the film was savaged by the critics, and was a financial flop. Audiences who were still coming to terms with the internet were for the most part confused by the vision of technological dystopia. But even if it was an absolute trainwreck, I love the cyberpunk zaniness of Johnny Mnemonic. Where else can you find a film where a cyborg dolphin uses its mind lasers to fight a psychotic terminator priest?
Yes, that was an actual scene in the movie. What’s more impressive is that someone pitched that to a movie producer, who after snorting a fat line of cocaine, decided it was cinema gold.
In the final sum up, Johnny Mnemonic is an absolute trainwreck of a film, and I loved every minute of it. I’m still looking for the pinnacle of trainwrecks, so if anyone can point me towards a copy of Cutthroat Island, please let me know!
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