“I can carry nearly eighty gigs of data in my head.”

Zombiedog’s rating: Hit me! Excellent!

Zombiedog’s review: Cyberpunk is one of those genres that’s very difficult to define. It deals with the degradation of society, the alienation of the people within it, and, above all, the technology that can be used for good or evil. Cyberpunk is steeped in concepts dealing from identity, structure of society, and ambiguous morality. For our purposes though, cyberpunk is an amazingly rich source of cult movies, B-movies, and genre defining scifi films.

Two things happened in the ’90s that led to a cyberpunk revolution. First, movie production ramped up along with independent productions to meet the ever-increasing demands of cable TV. Second, computer technology reached a saturation point where it started to enter every aspect of culture. In this atmosphere, people produced films of all types and everything was welcome including counterculture. This was cyberpunk’s heyday and the birthplace of Johnny Mnemonic.

It’s the year 2021. Society has really gone downhill and Johnny Mnemonic (Keanu Reeves) is a data courier who smuggles data across borders because the free interchange of information has now become illegal. Coming off some downtime, Johnny calls his handler and finds out there’s a job available that involves more data than he can safely carry.

You see, to get the data through border checkpoints, Johnny has had a prosthetic device installed in his brain (a flash drive) that is designated as a medical anti-seizure device. The danger here is that if he carries more data than the device will hold, it will kill him. Although, if he’s able to get the data and jump across the border he will earn a pile of cash.

OK, let’s get into it! Yes, this movie has a ton of technical problems that are easily dismissed by the current level of technology and some basic questions. Questions like, what kind of data are criminal organizations trying to get across borders? How can a storage device hold more data than it’s allowed to? Why hasn’t anybody put that dolphin out of its misery?

All I can say is let it go. This movie is not about logic, it’s not about predicting future technology, and it’s not a cautionary tale. This movie is just about crazy shit happening in a dystopian society.

Back to Johnny, where he’s made his way to the clients’ hotel suite and see’s that it’s pretty obvious these guys have never dealt with any underworld characters. They express concern about the integrity of the data and Johnny assures them everything will be fine. This is where we get one of the cool cyberpunk scenes with Johnny putting the data into his head. Not long after, the Yakuza shows up with the intent to kill everybody. Neo is clever though and manages to escape.

As you would imagine Johnny is a bit agitated that some armed men just tried to kill him. Instantly aware the data he is carrying may be more trouble than it’s worth, his main goal now is to get rid of the information as fast as possible. His handler tells him to come to a location where they will help him accomplish just that. The meeting isn’t what it seems and the solution to getting the information out of Johnny’s head is to remove his head. Understandably Johnny is against this plan and manages to escape once again.

During his escape we meet J-bone (Ice-T). J-bone is part of a counterculture militant group that is fighting the corporate powers that be. In the backdrop though, we realize that we are being shown a dystopian society. A society that is disintegrating not only around the edges but cracks down the foundation. This is the world Johnny inhabits and it’s filled with extremes. A world that appears to have no desire whatsoever to curb the chaos and insanity that defines it.

Moving from agitated to straight-up rage, Johnny decides to go visit his handler personally. His bad luck continues, and he’s sold out to the Yakuza. However in this world, somebody’s bad luck is somebody else’s opportunity. Jane (Dina Myers of Starship Troopers fame), a bodyguard-for-hire, catches Johnny in his moment of need and offers her services to free him from his current situation and protect him.

Jane comes with problems of her own, and it isn’t long after their team up that she has a seizure. Johnny manages to get her to a doctor (Henry Rollins) where he learns some serious plot points from the script.

Firstly, he learns that Jane has NAS — Nerve Attenuation Syndrome — commonly called the “Black Shakes.” This is a type of fatal neurological disorder that has infected a large percentage of the population due to over interaction with technology. Next, it is revealed to Johnny that the information in his head is data from the pharmaceutical company Pharmakom that details a cure for the neurological disease. The company has kept it secret that they have developed a cure because they want to keep selling people the treatment to the disease.

And so, we enter the third act where everybody is trying to kill Johnny for various reasons. We have a junkie street preacher/cyborg (Dolph Lundgren) hunting him down along with the Yakuza. By now even the government has caught wind of the situation and either wants Johnny to help them or they will go after him also. Throw in some flaming Volkswagens, a laser whip, and a bunch of anime references and you have the riveting ending.

In my opinion it’s impossible not to compare Johnny Mnemonic with The Matrix, being that the latter was only made four years later and both feature Keanu Reeves. I wouldn’t call The Matrix full-blown cyberpunk, but it fits more in that category than any other.

I should say that I watch Johnny Mnemonic at least two times a year. I’ve watched The Matrix series maybe three times in the past 20 years. Now my personal preferences don’t mean anything, I’m just trying to say from my point of view Johnny Mnemonic is far more entertaining. The Matrix was groundbreaking in many ways, it just doesn’t hold up for me. Johnny Mnemonic was cheap, shallow, and predictable, but it totally works. It’s fun for all the right reasons and it doesn’t matter that looking back on it now we can see its faults. The thing that Johnny Mnemonic gets right is that it’s a good-versus-evil story. The Matrix attempts to embrace the same storyline, albeit in a much more abstract way. In my mind this is why it’s not as memorable.

If you’ve never seen Johnny Mnemonic or are just a fan of B-movies, then run to your nearest video store (or whatever). While you’re at it make sure to grab as many friends who can put up with your B-movie taste then sit back and create a memory.

Justin’s rating: …and I can carry nearly 256 gigs of data in my pocket. So what?

Justin’s review: As I sit here to type this review, I am connected 24/7 to the internet with my various computers and can order an artificial intelligence to bow to my whim and tell me a bad dad joke. Yet I will never be 5% as cool as Keanu Reeves in a 1995 scifi movie.

Johnny Mnemonic… man, this is a film. It’s a film that gets (unfairly) compared to The Matrix for obvious reasons. It’s a film that’s a little too in love with its technology and not so much with its acting style. But it’s also a film that is perhaps the most cyberpunky project the ’90s produced — and that decade was obsessed with it. It’s kind of glorious and deserves more praise than mockery.

In my mind, this was a Philip K. Dick adaptation — but no, it’s actually based on a William Gibson short story from the ’80s. And that makes sense, because as much as Dick flirted with cyberpunk, Gibson WAS cyberpunk. And it’s a shame that more of Gibson’s works haven’t made the jump to movies as much as Dick, because the potential is there. But, to date, Johnny Mnemonic is the most notable attempt — and it was a box office flop.

It’s 2021, a global virus is ravaging the population, online connectivity is everywhere, hackers are revered, and Keanu Reeves is a pretty popular action movie star. Also, this movie. Reeves plays the titular Johnny, a data courier who stores confidential info in his head (a boggling 160 GB of it, which probably sounded massive at the time where we were still trading around 1.4 MB floppy discs with X-COM on it).

Anyway, to fund the removal of his implants, Johnny takes “one last run” for a couple of science geeks in a dystopian Blade Runner-like world. But almost immediately, he runs into problems. For starters, he’s taken on more storage into his brain than he can handle and will die within a couple of days unless he downloads it. And secondly, the Yakuza very much want this info and are willing to cut his head off to get it.

With a timer ticking down and people literally gunning for him, Johnny races across the globe from China to Newark to complete his run. He’s going to need some help, so he falls in with a bunch of “Lo-Teks” who eschew the corporate culture. They’re led by Ice-T (Tank Girl) and a cybernetic dolphin on their side, so I don’t see why anyone wouldn’t want to team up with them.

Johnny also stacks the odds in his favor by hiring twitchy Jane (Dina Meyer, Starship Troopers) to be his bodyguard. He’ll need it, too, because the Yakuza hire a deadly assassin named Street Preacher (Dolph Lundgren!) to scoop Johnny’s brain out of his skull.

As I said earlier, Johnny Mnemonic got a bad rap back in the day — but time’s seen this film trade its shame for some actual respect. TriStar poured a hefty $26M into making this, and it shows with the settings, F/X makeup, and computer effects. This is a fully realized cyberpunk world like we don’t usually see in movies, with implant-jacked bodyguards, scheming corporations, neon seediness, and a technology-infused lifestyle. What I’m trying to say is that this right here is a pretty cool flick, even if it is a little shaky on the dialogue and storyline.

I think what does hurt this film is that everyone plays their parts way too seriously. One, maybe two growly, stoic people would be acceptable, but after that, you gotta have variety! But everyone trying to be the gritted-teeth hero of the scene is a little much. I would’ve loved to seen some of its cast loosen up and have more distinct personalities. Johnny’s not nearly as charming as Reeves’ characters usually are, so it makes it a little hard to root for his selfish motives.

If you listen to the director or Gibson tell it, studio interference was to blame for Johnny Mnemonic’s failure. I guess when you have almost $30M on the line, you get risk-adverse — even if the genre you’re shooting was (and still is) pretty risky. Yet it’s not a total failure, not at all. I’ve never disliked going back to watch this, and for those making a collection of creative ’90s scifi, this belongs in that library.

And it’s got a cyborg dolphin, and who else gets to say that?

Intermission!

• Ugh, why did every scifi movie in the ’90s have to start with a text scroll?
• The internet in 2021 is much like a semi-cheesy late ’90s VR game
• Johnny’s use of a “doubler” to increase his storage makes me think of some of the compression apps we used to use on our very limited computers in the ’90s
• “Double cheese, anchovies?”
• “HIT ME!”
• Ahaha faxing in the future
• The little hand laser wire is pretty dang cool
• I like how the best bodyguards are female for their reflexes
• How many times the bad guys get the drop on the good guys and then don’t kill him because they want to deliver a one-liner
• “TIME! TO! GO!”
• He had to dump all his childhood
• Did Johnny just say “Thomson iPhones?” He did!
• Yeah just leave a girl twitching from a plague in the garbage
• “Halt sinners!” [and Dolph Lundgren gets run over]
• Poor Spider, he didn’t deserve that
• “Let’s drop a bug on the Spider!”
• OK, the “I WANT ROOOOM SERRRRRIVCE!” speech is a little over-the-top
• Heaven is such a cool set, but man, so many CRT monitors
• Cyber-dolphins love to be confined to a tank on top of a bridge
• The finale CGI VR sequence is so cheesy yet glorious
• Quick pics: Nemesis (1992), Circuitry Man (1990) Gunhed (1989)
• I (ZombieDog) watched the Japanese extended director’s cut version of this movie. It has eight more minutes of scenes.
• In the process of doing research for this review I tried to get a coherent listing of all cyberpunk movies. This proved to be very difficult and I defaulted to my own judgment on some of them. My initial question was, what was the first cyberpunk movie. My conclusion was Metropolis (1929). This is a movie directed by Fritz Lang and a masterpiece in my opinion. If you love movies or you love sci-fi I strongly recommend this film.
• Additionally if you’re really into cyberpunk and you want to explore it through comic book eyes I recommend the Transmetropolitan. It explores all the concepts we’ve been talking about.