With the release of a certain hyped Cyberpunk game, I decided to take a look at something in the genre that also starred Keanu Reeves and isn't the Matrix. Coming back from twenty-five years ago when the first virtual reality wave was peaking, the internet was still a symbol of bright digital future potential, and EDM was edgy, it's also one that proved...somewhat infamous. And yet, it's one of the few adaptations to come from the very originator of the cyberpunk genre himself. It may not be Neo, it may not even be John Wick, but is certainly Johnny Mnemonic.
First of all--the film was adapted from a 1981 short story by William Gibson, author of the book 'Neuromancer', considered by many to be the seminal cyberpunk work, after things like Blade Runner set the visual tone. Even though it was written in a time where any storage into the gigabyte range was considered near-unfathomable, Gibson's work of this time is proving increasingly prophetic as cybernetic prothesis becomes reality, to say nothing of corporate influence in both physical and digital realms. Though we don't have cyborg assassins with razor-limbs just yet, and though our current flash drives would induce heart attacks in Gibson's data-stealing protagonists living life on the edge, his stories and books are still interesting works, though their adaptations have proved surprisingly limited. Maybe it's because of this one--shall we find out?
Well, first of all, the film immediately spells out the era in which it was made with its projection of the internet as...some sort of 3D cityscape where you need VR gear to do pretty much anything. Apparently this induces some sort of neural disease too. Imagine how the world would look like if posting on social media or trying to find unmentionable things on certain video sites could literally rot your brain. Hell, I can think of many who'd try to brave such cyberspace realms just for cat videos anyway.
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| Just think, in less than a month, we'll be free of the regimes of Google and Apple, with all browsers to be replaced with indecipherable gibberish out of a 25-year old CD ROM game! |
Anyway, we get introduced to our hero Johnny, who is a data courier that carries information downloaded straight to his head. I mean, with network charges these days, and USBs so easy to flush down the toilet, why wouldn't you. Johnny is hard pressed for money, which he keeps blowing on hookers and expensive hotel rooms, making him such an endearing character. So, his fixer Udo Kier rasps to him a deal with some desperate people for a massive data delivery. Keanu goes about uploading this not just by inserting a drive, but by putting on a VR visor and making faces like he's taking a watermelon-sized deuce. While stills of random old-school anime schlock gets used as a keycode, for some reason. Email attachments are for wimps.
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| Yeah, I'd react the same if I was forced to have Matrix Revolutions beamed into my eyeballs. |
Things go awry, and it turns out Johnny is carrying sensitive stuff that the big evil corporation Pharmakom wants bad. Also, he exceeded his brain upload limit, meaning he has twenty four hours to live...or maybe forty-eight...well, some undefined time to give vague urgency to things. He ends up with Yakuza boss played by Takeshi on his tail, apparently hired by the corporation's AI, or something, and saddles with bodyguard for hire Jane (Dina Meyer), who is based on Gibson character Molly Millions but is far less cool. Or even really capable, she's supposedly enhanced but other than a few mentions it barely comes up.
In the middle of all this are an underground revolutionary movement of 'Lo-Teks' who periodically hijack signals to spout gibberish that sounds like Rage Against the Machine mad-libs, and oh, there's also a crazed preacher assassin in the mix played by a bearded Dolph Lundgren rocking the blond Charles Manson look. A cyborg drug-addicted dolphin plugged into computers also appears near the end. Feeling confused yet? Don't worry, it's only because it's all really, really silly.
But is it entertaining? Well, you've certainly got Keanu hamming it up, as oxymoronic as that may sound, playing his character as an entitled prick for most of the runtime. Whether he's demanding "a...COMPUTER!" or ranting about the civilized city life he apparently desires while gesticulating like someone with Tourette's that just stubbed their toe, it's sure as hell one side of his acting you might not have seen before. And that's before we get a hilarious sequence where he's searching online bank records with his super VR setup (phone apps are for wimps), fighting off AIs or something, all set to techno, making what would be a two-minute check for real people into an awesome display of gratuitous 90s CGI. Did I mention Dolph Lundgren playing a demented cyber-preacher, who lurches in out of nowhere at random points to rant and rave?
The film's pacing is all over the place--Keanu and Dina reach the place of the final confrontation a mere hour in, and it just draws itself out from there for forty-odd minutes, as Ice-T's gang has to help them by fending off corporate commandos, Yakuza, and a demented Dolph barging into things to ramble about Jesus just one more time for good measure. It's nonsensical, but between the nineties metal beats, the explosions, laser whips, Keanu hacking his brain with the help of a dolphin...there's some really dumb enjoyment to be had if this sounds like your thing.
Each threat is dealt with one by one like bosses in a videogame, before an expositing AI comes in to help everything when it's narratively convenient. We get treated to one more comical 90s CGI sequence where Keanu's cyberspace avatar becomes a hilarious straw figure with a huge fade. It's like Tron, except there's also a dolphin. Did I mention the dolphin?
The film ends as it began, with computer-generated gibberish and nineties-ness (here, the digital signal cast to the world via cybernetic implants and AIs has to be recored onto VCR, somehow!). It's like Max Headroom, almost, if Max did acid and watched Reboot too many times. So, is it any good? Erm...no, not really. It actually put people off the Matrix at first, who saw trailers of Keanu in a cyberpunk world of brain uploading and assumed it to be more of the same nonsense. But, between the off-kilter acting, the demented setups, and silliness played so straight...there's just enough for seekers of scifi schlock with a nineties flavor so strong you'll be left wearing flannel and wondering why nobody is interested in free AOL hours anymore.
But if you want some actually good nineties cyberpunk, stick to Strange Days, which came out the same year. Johnny Mnemonic is a mess, but it's a mess where you can just about see some value--there is an attempt at a theme of over-reliance on technology that corrodes body and mind, which resonates even more today. As a matter of fact, it got a recut that added more scenes and was slightly closer to director Robert Longo's vision...but only in Japan. Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, the film was one of the first to see real marketing via the internet, which executives assumed would provide all the word of mouth they needed. And it did...just not what they wanted.
So yeah. If you want some amusing contrast to where Keanu is now, and his current videogame outing where he's the AI getting into heads this time around, this might be worth a watch provided you can bring along beer and friends. Gibson of course wasn't too happy with this film, and maybe one day we'll see a more loyal adaptation of his work--but his influence on cyberpunk was wide enough that you can consider CD Projekt Red's videogame the next best thing. Either way, upload yourself to the cyberspace realm just to check your email, slick up your cranial modems with their staggering 15KB of RAM, and stick it to the megacorps any way you want.
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