“By the year 2001, there won’t be a person on this planet who isn’t hooked into it, and hooked into me.”

Justin’s rating: If only they knew that VR would still be a passing fad in 2025

Justin’s review: The Lawnmower Man will never be held up as a paragon of ’90s movie making, but it has become an unexpected monument to a flash-in-the-pan era where we were on the cusp of the World Wide Web, virtual reality, and CGI omnipresence in cinema — but not quite there yet.

Nominally, oh-so-nominally based on a Stephen King short story, The Lawnmower Man looks at a possible future where a one-two combo of psychoactive drugs and virtual reality can start to reshape and expand the minds of people. Dr. Lawrence (Pierce Brosnan, on the cusp himself of becoming James Bond) decides that the best subject for his company’s experimental treatment is Jobe (Jeff Fahey), a downtrodden lawnmower man clearly on the spectrum and who’s unable to relate well to the world around him.

Of course, as monkeying around with the human brain in movies tends to go, Jobe develops abnormally high intelligence — and abnormally high levels of aggression. By plugging into the internet, he’s able to take vengeance on mean people with the MIGHTY POWER OF CGI. Oh and mind reading and telekinesis, why not.

I guess the CGI is what we need to talk about, because it’s all anyone remembers of this film. One must remember that this was 1992, and we were still a couple of years away from seeing CGI integrated into movies like Jurassic Park to any believable effect. So computer effects were strictly a novelty, and like all novelties, the eight minutes of CGI in The Lawnmower Man aged horribly. Yet there’s a quaint, back-in-the-day charm to their crudeness as well.

New Line was always game for scifi experiments, so it makes sense that the studio would pour a half-million bucks into a marquee novelty that might put some butts in the seats. If the CGI has any redeeming value, it’s that it’s not — unlike most later ’90s uses of it — trying to look anything close to realistic. I’d even say that the evil computer Jobe looks downright freaky because of its unnatural design.

But if we look past the CGI, there’s a pretty interesting story happening with its human cast. Both of its main characters are seeking redemption — Lawrence with the validation of his project brought to fruition, and Jobe with a clear desire not to be the literal whipping boy of the world. It’s really hard to create an autistic character that’s not a laughable parody, but Jeff Fahey does a great job here as an earnest soul who’s getting yanked around every which way by the people in authority over him. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that when the power is flipped to his favor, he goes a bit crazy with it.

Despite people low-key mocking The Lawnmower Man in modern culture for its cheesy awe of technology that’s pretty quaint to us now, I see it as a success. It made a profit, generated a sequel, spawned two video games, and — most important to any movie — hasn’t been forgotten. In fact, you could see it as a trend-setter for the explosion of ’90s cyberpunk movies like Nemesis, Ghost in the Shell, Virtuosity, Johnny Mnemonic, and The Matrix.

It’s worth a watch for any ’90s movie fan — and there’s always a director’s cut with 30 extra minutes for those who’ve seen the theatrical version already.

Intermission!

• Battle ape! This is a good use for our tax dollars!
• If you’re in VR, you best be in a wildly flipping gyroscope
• VR headsets can allow you to see and hear through walls
• That’s the worst Irish accent I’ve ever heard
• VR is all about falling through jellybeans
• Peter is that kid from The Last Action Hero
• Taking your shirt off is “perverted behavior?”
• Round sunglasses, it’s a ’90s flick!
• Who needs seatbelts when you’re driving and rapidly changing CDs?
• “Awesome! Dudical!”
• So Jobe can read minds now, I guess
• Teleconfrences should shove the camera as close to the speaker’s face as possible
• “I saw God! I touched God!”
• You can make out in VR despite not having anything attached to your mouth
• You just lobotomized your girlfriend, way to go
• Mind-controlled lawnmowing is the wave of the future!
• The burning effect is so, so bad
• “Lawnmower Man’s in your head now, Jake. There’s no escape now, ever.”
• LAWNMOWER IN THE LIVING ROOM!
• “Where’s the rest of him?” “Bird bath.”
• Shooting uzis at floating heads doesn’t do too much
• VR can turn you into a bunch of balls that float away