Prologue: A Movie Too Big To Enjoy
Took me too damn long to figure out what to write next. My first instinct was to write about a film I enjoy. Something that gives actual joy when watching. Makes sense, right?
So, I start watching this movie that got shitted on back in the day by the critics and I believed, at the time of release, that they were wrong and that I was one of the few super smart persons alive that could truly see the true genius that was covered in their critical pile of shit. Tragedy struck my ego though when watching the 2005 cut of the Guy Ritchie film Revolver.
The film started out interesting enough with Jason Statham, along with the implanted rat nest he called hair, winning big money but it was soon after that something was wrong.
The Hair in Question
The movie kept playing and the dialogue that was said, the same words I was intrigued and mesmerized 15 years ago, became more and more dull to even warrant my attention. No longer did the hidden Kabbalah meanings mean anything to try and solve nor the realization that Mr.Gold is just Ego or some shit like that mattered anymore. I just ended up being so goddamn bored by it. I couldn’t believe that I actually enjoyed this but then again, I was 15 years of age at the time of release. Those turbulent prepubescent years that makes you believe without doubt that you know more but in actuality don’t really know shit. It’s still the same now but it is far easier to take in stride all the shit I don’t know.
If there is one thing that the movie reminded me of, something that I must have succeeded in stamping out of my head until now, it was the following; Ray Liotta, overly tanned skin with nothing but leopard printed underwear on, holding a gun and screaming ‘Fear Me!’ as Jason Statham and his partner in crime hairstyle walk past him.
(I was going to insert an image of Ray Liotta in his leopard print underwear but decided against it.)
After surviving the picture, I stared into the final black screen, because there are no credits in the beginning or end of it, and realized that I’ve been holding the torch for a film that sure didn’t hold up but I saw a silver lining. After spending time reflecting on time I could never get back…I came to the conclusion that the least I could do is write about it. The second deadly mistake.
Fooling myself that if I stare long enough at the blank page that I would get these diseased creative juices gushing to write something down. It was only after the fifth beer of a fancy pants IPA, I should also make note that it was at this point that I had to hold the pencil in a closed fist to keep some resemblance of writing straight, that I was able to put down a single word that stretched and covered the entire blank sheet of paper.
WHY?!
I felt relieved at seeing that word but realized that it wouldn’t be much to type up.
A real shame too because in those youthful days, I thought the film was great. I remember back in 2005, I had a buddy burn me an ILLEGAL copy, I bought it legally from the far east lands of British Country to write about it now, since the film didn’t get a US release. I watched it then and saw genius then talked shit on the IMDB boards with people that didn’t understand said genius. What fond memories of youth but now as a decrepit old man, I no longer feel such a way. Whatever joy I felt from watching that film back in those sad puberty gone wild mustache days is long gone now. All the better to be honest.
Prologue Pt.II: Now What?
The conundrum that this threw me in was now having to figure out what to watch and only such a simple single question could offer so many, possibly too many?, answers.
I was lost. Distraught. I couldn’t trust anything I had as far as memory was concerned so I had to search for something unseen. But I still had 1 more beer so I drank that and then I realized that I couldn’t watch a movie tonight so I slept. In that six pack fueled dream, there really wasn’t much to decipher. There was a factory. A very, very strange factory in the dream but that’s for something else. I woke up feeling not great and seeing that I was broke but not too broke.
For you see dear reader, whenever one such as I fall into this state of being lost and distraught there is only one place to find peace. The beer section at the local liquor store. But at the time of experiencing this state of existence it was 100 degrees outside and with only spare change in my pocket, I know some drinks are only a dollar or two away but I’m a man of taste and require something better when it comes to alcohol filled beverages, there was only one other alternative; the local video store. Yes, you read what I wrote right.
The local video store. A place where dreams are sitting on the shelves and fading forever away from the setting sun because management refuse to install shades on the windows. A second home this store has become whenever in the search for something hidden and forgotten. Some real treasures have been found in my visits of the past and many of them I have enjoyed. Titles such as Body Double, Blood In Blood Out, and Barfly. While there were also some recent films that were just a complete waste of time to watch like Gods of Egypt, the recently released Hellboy, and Captain Marvel.
The sun was shining 100 degrees hard on this day of feeling lost amigos. Only seeing now that it was the radioactive sun beams of destiny for as I walked through aisles in search of an answer, the solution instead found me in the form of a Keanu Reeves movie.
There are many of them out there and with the lack of creativity when it comes to marketing a movie, it is safe to say that at least 95% of his movies have his image on the cover without a single thought to anyone else in the movie but this movie to be was not Speed. Nor was it any of the recent John Wick films or Point Break. All very fine films that could be enjoyed over and over again but what was sitting snugly on the top shelf of the science fiction section was the 1995 film Johnny Mnemonic.
Movie Marketing 101
A real special treat because the only thing I could remember from the last time I saw it was that Ice T was constantly yelling at me about Keanu Reeves doing something about hacking.
Excitement began to fill my veins as I held the movie in my hands and I paid that dollar and change for a 5 day rental without any doubts. What could go wrong? What follows is a play by play of the entire film. Written verbatim as best as I could remember before blacking out.
Your Feature Presentation
Darkness.
Then laser beams set the viewers up for the world they are about to enter.
Corporations rule the world.
Nerve Attention Syndrome or NAS is killing EVERYBODY.
There's a resistance group called the Lo-Teks who are out to take out the corporations by taking them all the way to the bank. The blood bank.
Corporations hire the Yakuza who apparently have taken over all of the crime syndicates in the world.
Then here comes Johnny.
Mnemonic Couriers smuggle data in their "wet-wired brain implants."
Earth sucks.
Boom. The 1995 CGI interpretation of the internet in 2021. If you ever saw and enjoyed that TV show Reboot, that computer animated show with those turquoise colored people fighting in purple cubes, then you’ll dig the way this shit looks.
The Internet
We travel down and around the CYBERSPACE until we end up as the wake up call on the screen of Johnny’s television in a fancy pants hotel room. He wakes up and sees that life is pretty great. Hookers on call. Room service. The good life but he has a hankering to get his memory back.
He took out a piece of his long term memory, portions of his childhood, to become a data courier and wants to get an operation to get it back, or something to that effect, but there’s a hitch in the plan.
Ralfi, the guy who looks around for Johnny’s jobs, played by the great Udo Kier, is saying that the doctors are upping the price of the brain surgery to half a million. Johnny ain’t got the cash and so he needs to go on one last job.
Or at least I think this is the story of it so far. I didn’t read the William Gibson short story, same dude who also wrote the screenplay, that this is based off but this seems to be the shit that kicks off the movie. Its the one last job schtick but IN THE FUTURE.
Central Beijing. Looks like a sound stage to me but for all intents and purposes, its that China. Into the hotel elevator he goes, knowing that he needs the mental juice to get the job done and so he loads himself up a 2x doubler while cruising at terminal velocity towards the top floor. The reason for the doubler? The hard-drive in his head only has 80 Gigabytes of storage but with that doubler, he can get himself 160.
The problem he soon finds out is that the job itself entitles 320 Gigabytes of storage. Those scientist nerds waste no time to tell him that being at over capacity only offers him a couple of days before the data gets corrupted with the even bigger problem being that Johnny ain’t going have a brain no more if he keeps it in his head for too long a time.
It’s do or die for Johnny since he needs the cash and gets himself hooked up for download. He puts on his pair of VR glasses and says ‘Hit Me.’ then gets bombarded with so much mid 90’s CGI that he starts to convulse.
While convulsing, there is a code to the data that the scientist have to create. Encoding the data so that nobody, not even Johnny, could get a look into it. The code being three images of whatever pops up on the big ass hotel television. Three random images pop up and download into Johnny’s head with the scientist needing to send the three images over to whoever was going to receive the data to decipher it later on.
During the download, trouble comes from the ground floor as the Yakuza ride the elevator up and get themselves ready to kill every last nerd in the room.
Download complete. Johnny heads to the bathroom and has a massive brain fart that leaves him weak with a bloody nose until he starts his breathing exercises to get himself calm. Feeling at ease just as the Yakuza show and kill every last nerd. They send the bald white Yakuza guy into the bathroom where Johnny attacks him with the door.
“Next time knock, baldy.”
Is what Keanu says when knocking down the white guy member of the Yakuza. This is the time before ‘I know kung fu’ so Johnny bar brawls his way out to make his escape. The real highlight of the scene? The cool laser chain whip thing that can cut stuff. The main Yakuza man slices off a scientist hand with it. That was rad. On the run, Johnny heads back to New York City to deliver the goods.
This New York existing in that glorious state as the truly beautiful shit hole it was before Giuliani cleaned it up and made it Disneyland.
Boom. Takeshi Kitano is a boss, I don’t if he’s the head boss or anything because the movie doesn’t really say or I wasn’t paying much attention but in my imagined plot-line of the film he is just THE BOSS, of PharmaKon. The company that got their valuable information stolen from the dead scientists that then downloaded into Johnny’s head. Boring conversation between Kitano and Yakuza guy with the intention being ‘Cut off his head and get me that data.’
Ralfi hangs out in boring nightclubs with two bodyguards waiting for Johnny to show up when Spider, played by just all around cool dude Henry Rollins, and Jane, Dina Meyer who you probably know as Dizzy from Starship Troopers, show up to the boring nightclub.
She tries to show off how great of a bodyguard she could be by beating up his bodyguards but then she starts shaking from the NAS she has and is ridiculed for her cheap street implants. Implants as in body enchantment shit like strength and all that that. Cool science fiction stuff but its a shame that besides some plugs glued on her skin and there aren’t any robot arms or anything like that. Well there is but its not like cool robot arms.s
Johnny heads to the middle of nowhere for the drop off and gets double crossed by Ralfi’s goons with the bald headed Yakuza man leading the charge. Johnny manages to escape with an explosion.
Ice T shows up as J-Bone and watches the scene unfold from the opening of a tall building. A not suspenseful at all scene happens where the bald Yakuza man looks for Johnny in the middle of a trash heap? I don’t know where the fuck they are but then J-Bone’s buddy, who just showed up, gets shot by the bald headed Yakuza man.
A real tragic ending in that he not only gets shot but also turns limp like a dummy as he falls to his death. J-Bone drops in and doesn’t react to the Yakuza man’s threats. Johnny kills the bald headed Yakuza and saves J-Bone’s life who then saves Johnny’s a second later with a small crossbow gun on his arm.
J-Bone tells Johnny who he is and that he leads the Lo-Tek and runs Heaven. Pointing at a broken bridge, I don’t know what bridge but its one of those big ass New York bridges you see in all the movies, then disappears.
CUT TO:
Ralfi trying to take a piss in peace but Johnny points a gun and ruins the mood. He gets knocked out by one of Ralfi’s bodyguard and is then hooked up to a table. Future nightclubs really suck as Jane is bored but then Scooby Doo’s her way in following Ralfi by jumping into the ceiling vents from the bathroom. Yakuza man with the cool laser chain says he has to cut off Johnny’s head to avoid data decay which is pretty cool.
Jane jumps in to save the day. Ralfi’s bodyguards suck. Another Yakuza white guy runs in with his gun out but doesn’t shoot and is immediately killed. The music is pretty ass all around but Udo Kier gets sliced into three pieces at the end of the scene which is cool but the shot doesn’t last too long to enjoy the sight so boo on them.
Johnny and Jane are on the run. Future guns suck and they escape into the sewers with the help of the Lo-Tek getting into a stand off with the Yakuza. Exposition and boring stuff then they break into a computer store.
They get all this equipment that means absolutely nothing except I-Phone which was funny to hear. Johnny means business when he puts on those brand VR glasses and future gloves.
VR at its Finest
He’s goes into that CGI internet with his CGI hands. Johnny starts doing all this goofy shit in the real world while searching for clues on the net. Trying to figure out where the fax was sent but the Yakuza are locking on to him.
They got the location: Crazy Bob’s Computer Shop.
Incoming virus.
Future cars sound the part but do not look the part. Weird woman in the machine telling Johnny that the Yakuza are on the way. A real ‘no shit lady’ moment.
Kitano calls Carl. Some dude in a church. Big Buff Dolph Lundgren is a priest that is a hitman on the side and is now on the hunt for Johnny. Johnny then makes a deal with the corporation while Jane says that Spider can help him out. Dizzy gets the shakes. The black shakes. Wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle. Taxi cabs in the future don’t give a shit about dropping you off in the weirdest of places, including a shady spot that have absolutely nothing but nefarious wheelings and dealings going on, as long as you pay the fare.
Johnny meets Spider. He takes care of Jane and then goes about telling Johnny the real truth. That technology is fucking all of us up and giving us that NAS. Kitano finds out that the ghost in the machine is a woman that used to run PharmaKon. Or something like that. Carl gets the info he needs from the robot arm bartender at the boring nightclub who now doesn't have a robot arm.
The three head out in Spider's modified USPS van and run over Carl. Grand Central Station is filled to the brim with people dying of NAS and the music lets you know that its a real heartfelt moment. NAS underground want whats in Johnny's head. Henry Rollins is trying to hack in but no dice.
The world is at stake with whats in Johnny's head; The cure for NAS. Carl on the rampage killing the people dying of NAS and the doctors helping them out. Jane gotta get Johnny to Jones. Some good Jesus imagery with Spider getting scalpels into the center of his hands. Lo-Tek headquarters is on the bridge itself. I didn’t realize it since all I saw was a faraway matte painting of what he was pointing at.
Bad comedy scene of Lo-Tek morons dropping a car bomb onto Spiders USPS van. Weird scene of Johnny acknowledging that he hasn't done shit responsibility wise and now with all the responsibility of the world on his shoulders, he still doesn’t like having responsibility. He just wants room service. A Club sandwich. Cold Mexican beer, possibly radiated, and 10,000 dollar a night hookers. Laundered shirts. Just the good things in life.
J-Bone lowers down to Johnny and Jane as he passes out again from an even heavier brain fart. Jane and J-Bone help him into Lo-Tek headquarters.
This love story, is that what it is?, goes absolutely nowhere. I mean, DAMN. Just nothing. Is it just in science fiction where two people supposedly in love can never be believable IN love? Is it just written into the script that now is the part where they fall in love? Doesn’t last long since Johnny needs to get this shit out of his head.
Lo-Tek Heaven = art installation with TV's stacked on top of one another.
Heaven on Earth
Then the ultimate reveal is that Jones turns out to be an augmented dolphin that was experimented on by the government to track down submarines.
Commie Fighter Jones
Some real goofy shit going on but I actually love it. Yakuza shit about to pop off. Johnny worst for wear. They gotta hook up Johnny to the dolphin. Johnny keeps on refusing but at this point, does Johnny have any choice but to do so?
Yakuza infiltrate Lo-Tek headquarters. Lo-Tek guards suck. Super VR machine with dolphin squeaking.
VR at its FINEST
Decapitation by laser chain whip. Very cool. Yakuza attacking ruins the download. Johnny’s only option is that he gotta hack his own brain.
Oh damn, its about to GO DOWN.
J-Bone fires his crossbow with a through the mouth shot. Kitano walks in the scene with a revolver and samurai sword. The ghost in the machine chick projects herself like the Master Computer in Tron to let Kitano know the truth about the cure in Johnny's head. Kitano gets shot by the Yakuza. No Mercy. Keanu decapitates Yakuza guy with his own whip. Very cool but you don't really get to see it. Not cool. Carl shows up and yells for everyone to hear his catchphrase 'Jesus Time.'
Kitano hands off the first two images for the code then dies. Carl is about to crucify Jane. He really sticks with the tried and true Christ imagery. Carl beats up Johnny. Doesn't really make sense now that Carl is still on the hunt since Kitano is dead. Dolphin is mind thinking sonic waves through satellites in the room to fry Carl's implants. Carl burns to death holding two electrical wires. That was unexpected. I guess the Yakuza and Lo-Tek gang have stopped fighting.
“The dolphin can take you into the data.” the ghost in the machine women says to Johnny. ICE-T's reaction of 'what the fuck am I seeing' is a reflection of what I was feeling.
Not the actual image but close enough
Johnny is going to hack his brain even if it means the death of him. Ice T tells the world to ‘Get your VCR's ready…’ and I never knew there was a God until I heard that. CGI Johnny is entering the CGI representation of his brain. Only J-Bone could help us understand what the fuck we are seeing by narrating the CGI scenes.
The dolphin loops the third image which happens to be the ghost in the machine. Keanu Reeves stares into blinking lights while all this shit goes down. This music is some real out of place shit. All the information about the cure for NAS is scattered on every screen in the world but what the fuck does it all mean? No idea. Johnny unlocks the memories of his birthday when he was 7 years old. Doesn’t seem like a childhood that you want to pay a million bucks and change to get back instead of having a cool hard drive. Johnny falls out of the VR headset but survives.
Pharmakom Headquarters blows up. Payback time. So I guess someone else will make the cure. Burnt out husk Carl is hauled off and thrown in the river. Natures garbage chute. Love ending. Everybody happy.
The Search Begins
It’s a real whatever movie watching it now. I’m sure if someone handed me the VHS to this back in the day instead of the VHS tape for Robocop that maybe for a week or two I would have said that this was my favorite science fiction film. In all likelihood, probably not since if I never saw Robocop then I would no doubt watch Total Recall which just happens to be a perfect movie but I would have at least watched the CGI scenes in this movie over and over again.
Camp is a word that could be used to describe what this movie is. What with its super serious tone with super not serious action occurring throughout but that seems like a crutch. There is missed potential here and I’m no expert on the world they adapted since I haven’t read the short story it was based on but I did read William Gibson’s other short story Burning Chrome.
If you ever read that then you know how expansive that specific world is in just that small piece of fiction. Ideas that at the time when he wrote were just so far far out there as to what was being expected in science fiction. The idea of the internet, that was only about to hit the streets for the public at large when the movie came out, was something that you would be able to physically manifest was something that wasn’t even on the brains of normal every day people unless they saw that movie Tron back in the day.
But then again, this speculation needs to be verified and the only way was to get on my pair of VR goggles and start searching the internet.
The Search Underway
1995. I travel down the data streams. Side tracked by a playlist of clips from the TV show Spaced but ultimately I made my way down the hole where rabbits live to lead me to this specific year.
A year that Nostradamus predicated would be the very year of great change, whether for the better or for worse remains to be seen, and he was right. For this was the year AOL became self aware and 56k modem noises were dialing numbers that most likely brainwashed all of us without even knowing it. Was it coincidence that Windows 95 was released in 1995 as well? Think about it: 56+95= 151 = SATAN. Math is never wrong and neither is my opinion that some high quality science fiction movies came out this year.
Quite a few but only a few will be mentioned and out of those few are some worth discussing. And so, through the foggy and cracked VR lens of a self proclaimed genius, I’ll give a brief overview of why this film stands out as subpar from the rest of what came out.
Strange Days. A thriller about catching a killer but with the cool twist being that there is a device that people wear on their head that enables them to live through other peoples memories and experiences for a few minutes time. Virtual Reality at its nucleus. The movie also encapsulates prominent civil unrest and practically just the whole world already in a shitty place and turning even more shitty as 1999 comes to an end. Watching this makes you think that its a real shame Kathryn Bigelow (the director of this along with Point Break) never got a chance to do an adaptation of Burning Chrome. It’s a great film even with Tom Sizemore’s ridiculous haircut.
Virtuosity. Deals with a AI played by Russel Crowe who was created to be a collection of the most dangerous serial killers ever for a police simulation and then manages to manifest into the real world. Not the most solid of movies but Denzel Washington has a line about pulling the burner ,or I think heater?, from the backseat of the car when referring to a shotgun. That was cool.
12 Monkeys. Probably one of the best films to come out in this year and deals with time traveling Bruce Willis trying to figure out what caused the death of the planet in the future by heading to the past and looking for clues. All the while dealing with his brain trying to make sense of this dream he’s had since childhood and what reality he keeps jumping to and from is the real reality.
Ghost in the Shell. A movie about a Security team searching for a hacker and along the ways they deal with the philosophical implications of identity in this future world. Can say more because it’s been awhile since I saw it but it’s definitely one of the highlights of the year.
Here are the mainstay in science fiction for 1995 but what do they all have in common? The search, man. Except maybe Virtuosity since that deals with a real simple search of finding the bad guy which pushes that narrative stuff of why in the beginning but the other films offer so much more. More in that existential searching.
Strange Days deals with the main guy Lenny Nero, a real burnout LAPD officer, in search of the why this woman, who came to him pleading for help, died and who was doing the killing. Becoming this well crafted thriller that unravels with the use of the VR device but also, throughout the film, he’s searching for reason. To keep on living because the scumbag life he has going on isn’t how he wants to get by but he doesn’t know any other way of getting his shit together until having to go through this ordeal so that by the end of the film he earns his redemption and all that jazz. (Sidenote: Angela Bassett is a real badass motherfucker in this movie.)
12 Monkeys deals with the idea of destiny and never being able to avoid it or change it no matter what you do. It’s this strange puzzle of where the longer you watch the movie the less sure you are of what reality is true reality. Leaving Bruce Willis having to come to terms of whether he was actually losing his mind or actually being sent from the future that all builds to that scene in the airport which is FANTASTIC. The ultimate realization that the dream he has had since his childhood of seeing the man be killed was in fact his own death.
Ghost in the Shell. Like I said before, I don’t have much of a recollection about the film. This being the animated film which looks great and not the live action film which wasn’t that great. I could only remember that there was a whole lot of philosophical talking at the end of the film when the cyborg chick gets real buff and rips off the tank cover then stares at the sky since she doesn’t have any arms anymore. Or something like that but the search is there. I remember that. This AI in a Cybernetic body looking for reason in their existence while on the hunt for this hacker that’s starting all this trouble. I should give this another watch soon.
But back on point, an underlining theme in all these films were that the characters were in search of meaning and understanding. Then there’s Johnny Mnemonic which just seems to stick out like a sore thumb. So what happened?
The Answers Discovered
The first clue was finding out the director was Robert Longo. A dude that’s known for his art, though I don’t know anything about it, and a couple music videos he’s directed but the most important piece of information being that this was his first and only foray into feature films.
There have been a couple of people that made the transition from being an artist into directing such as Steve McQueen (Shame, 12 Years a Slave, and Hunger) and Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and The Butterfly and At Eternity’s Gate) but this is not the case for Longo. Though it was possible that he was unprepared for the runaway train of a high budget feature from what I’ve read.
For in the beginning, Longo and Gibson were striving to make a low budget art flick for around a million and a half. Instead they managed to get tumbled into a nearly 30 million dollar production. The stakes sure do get higher the more money that gets involved.
Then I found this quote from Gibson.
“Basically what happened was it was taken away and re-cut by the American distributor in the last month of its pre-release life, and it went from being a very funny, very alternative piece of work to being something that had been very unsuccessfully chopped and cut into something more mainstream.”
A link found to the beginning intentions and to the end product which turns out not to be what the director nor writer envisioned to come to fruition but then again, how a better movie could be seen in whats already there is pretty tough to imagine.
The Thought That’s Theorized A Theory
In convulsing from the information hitting me, I created my own theorized theory to make sense of what happened in the middle.
Here’s this short story written by Gibson. Robert Longo probably got around to reading something that Gibson wrote, or the short story itself, and dug what he read. He gets in contact with Gibson who then says that he has this script for Johnny Mnemonic that they should work on trying to make a film out of it. Longo starts brainstorming the visuals of it and thinks to himself that if they get their hands on a million and a half then they could make something really cool because if there is one central law in film making, its the following: Lack of cash forces you to use your imaginations to make up for it.
So they go around that weird Hollywood town and try to get some funding but in those 90’s days ,that followed the 80’s motto of ‘Greed is Good’, they most likely faced only one question being asked: Wheres the money to be made in something like this?
Until they met up with Sony Pictures or Sony Pictures came to them. Someone was on the know and saw some potential and started throwing money at it. The budget grew and that must have been fucking crazy for Gibson and Longo who must have been stoked. No longer were the limitations of cash a problem for them but then another problem must have come along; Producers.
There have been many stories about producers coming in and ruining a movie. One that comes to mind is the original cut of Blade Runner. It’s still a beautiful film to look at but with the intrusive narration track, you should watch that Tears in the Rain scene with the narration for a real laugh, and the forced ending of Deckard and Rachael driving off in the sunset without a care in the world is pretty bad.
But then again, on the other side of the coin there are the producers that give too much power to the director and then that leads them having to take part of the blame for the financial failure of the film. The prime example forever to be is the film Heaven’s Gate. That movie sunk an entire studio to shut down.
To point the finger at one group of persons doesn’t seem right though.
My theory is that the producers and filmmakers loved the shit out of the material but when they reached the point of actually having to film this and that, I bet there was a sense of ‘Oh shit. How do we actually go about this?’
The CGI scenes are just fine as is and that isn’t the problem. There is hardly enough of it to be a distraction except for the climax with without Ice-T’s narration would be completely lost on the viewer as to what the hell is going on.
The problem to me was the world building and lack of it. The entire film itself doesn’t have a great look to it and if I be so bold to say, it looks like a Cannon film. And Cannon films are the absolute bottom of the barrel, except for maybe 3 films total, when it comes to films. Especially the science fiction films.
The idea of a living breathing world is probably there in the script but it falls flat on the screen. There is no truth to what they were presenting with that opening crawl and that lack of world building then leaves the viewer with a lacking sense of direction that then forces them to fend for themselves by making up whats missing with the imagination. And that’s only if the viewer actually strives to put the work in. Then again, this new digital frontier is something new to viewers that just come off the street and thus when the world building effort on film-makers part fails then the next step the viewer takes to make it work is to try and believe in the characters on the screen. Which for the most part works. At least for me.
Henry Rollins as Spider is great. The dude doesn’t look like a doctor but plays it straight enough to believe that he is a doctor…OF THE FUTURE. Kitano as a boss of a corporation is great. Doesn’t speak a word of English but still does his thing to create a presence. Ice T as J-Bone is good. He seems to be the smartest person in the entire Lo-Tek gang and so it makes sense they put his as a leader. Dolph Lundgren as this fucking crazy ass street preacher who goes around killing people for money is FANTASTIC is a very dumb way. So then whats the problem? Johnny.
There’s just nothing there to gauge an interest in the character. Nothing about his current situation, his desires, his needs, and whatever else there is to make him believable exists to keep you engaged on whether he solves the issue of whether his head is going to explode or not. Or his whole childhood thing. That’s the problem.
The whole reason he goes on this one last job are for those memories. That search to have a piece of his organic humanity back after having it replaced with an artificial hard drive. It’s a perfect reason and it’s in its rightful place to be a piece of bait on a hook for the audience. It’s existence as a plot device is to keep you enticed and invested in Johnny but you already gave up caring when you first see clearly that the bait was synthetic.
I don’t believe this is any way Keanu Reeve’s fault. Well, maybe a little but the dude has shown off time and time again that he could carry a movie and be a character. From Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure where he played a time traveling stoner to a movie like Speed where he was a LA cop chasing down a bus. He could act but there’s just something missing here and I don’t know what it is but its just a real empty character.
End of Transmission
I take off my VR goggles and realize that this material is strong stuff. Nuclear strong. Strong enough to be explored through so many various way but as this movie shows, it sometimes doesn’t translate as a 1 to 1 ratio. Math. Who gets the blame on that?
Does the blame rest on William Gibson? Probably not but then maybe it does. At least a smudge. Maybe he wrote a script that was so fucking out there that nobody could grasp onto it. The first rule of screenwriting is to throw everything in even the kitchen sink. Maybe he wrote something that nobody could critique. Speculation but if I could find a copy of the script, that would be an interesting read.
On Roberto Longo? Maybe a little. I mean, the dude should have invested more into striving to make the material come alive from the page because most of the shots in the film are real boring visually. Were there any interesting story boards in place to help sell the idea? Or was it all talk? In the end, he shouldn’t get all the blame since he was probably in a situation that was too out of his control. Give 30 million bucks to a dude that’s never directed a feature film? Real smart.
Do I blame Sony? A whole lot more than the other two. There should have been some guidance on their part to try and get the film on track instead of waiting till the end to cut it up into something that could conceivably get their money back.
Do I blame the score? No, it was just bad all around. Nothing could have saved that. Not even a better movie.
I put whatever blame is left on myself though. For having spent the dollar and change to watch a movie I couldn’t remember and only realizing now that it was for good reason why I forgot it in the first place.
The Final Epilogue
After I chucked out my stupid VR glasses, I come to the conclusion that Johnny Mnemonic was never a good movie. It’s probably a good short story but its not a good movie. Maybe in that low budget dream it could have been something interesting but this isn’t that. It’s a pretty high budget 96 minute film about a dude whose head might explode but whether or not isn’t the question you ask yourself when watching. It’s whether if his head does explode and if they’ll make good on showing it happen.