1995 wasn’t an especially great year for science fiction cinema. CONGO, WATERWORLD, SCREAMERS, VIRTUOSITY and STRANGE DAYS weren’t too auspicious, and neither was JOHNNY MNEMONIC, a film that was forecast to be a revolutionary melding of cyberpunk and mainstream sensibilities, but is best viewed nowadays as a dry run for THE MATRIX (1999).
JOHNNY MNEMONIC (1995) Trailer)
A $26 million Sony production, JOHNNY MNEMONIC was the first, and thus far only, feature film scripted by the Canadian cyberpunk guru William Gibson (in the wake of his famous unmade ALIEN III screenplay), adapting his own 1981 short story. Continuing with the first-and-only category, JOHNNY MENEMONIC was also the first and only feature directed by the famous American artist Robert Longo (following the short film ARENA BRAINS), who corralled an impressive cast that included Japanese superstar Takeshi Kitano (who had 7 minutes of additional footage in the Japanese version of the film), Henry Rollins, Ice-T, Udo Kier and Dolph Lundgren, and a crew that included editor Ronald Sanders (David Cronenberg’s editor of choice) and visual consultant Syd Mead (BLADE RUNNER). How did it all go so wrong? Let’s see.
The setting is the “future” year 2021, in which corporations rule the world and data is the ultimate currency (anyone who’s read Gibson’s seminal NEUROMANCER knows the drill). Johnny (Reeves) is a “mnemonic courier” with a unique attribute: he’s able to store enormous amounts of computerized data in his head (at the cost of his childhood memories), leading to various organizations and individuals using him as a human storage dump. Many others want to kill Johnny and chop off his head, most notably Takahashi (Kitano), a Yakuza boss funded by the megacorporation Pharmakom.
Johnny teams up with Jane (Dina Meyer), a sexy bodyguard with cybernetic enhancements (essentially a rehash of NEUROMANCER’s Molly), and Spider (Rollins), a renegade doctor who rants about “technological fucking society” while trying to decrypt the contents of Johnny’s head. Spider also reveals that Pharmakom has the cure for a plague currently ravaging the world, but refuses to release it because short-term treatments are more cost-effective.
There’s also Karl Honig (Dolph Lundgren), a psychotic street preacher (a character forced on Gibson and Longo by Sony executives) who constantly turns up to cause mayhem, and a pivotal personage named Jones that’s revealed to be a virtual reality equipped dolphin, a highly promising character whose best scenes were cut.
Speaking of which: the entire film underwent heavy studio-mandated reediting against Longo’s wishes (with a newly decolorized version, JOHNNY MNEMONIC: IN BLACK AND WHITE, released in 2022, being the closest thing to a director’s cut that exists) and sold as an actioner. It can be viewed as the inverse of the other major 1990s Gibson adaptation, the Abel Ferrara helmed NEW ROSE HOTEL (1998), which was quite arty in its approach.
The poetic technological vistas of Gibson’s fiction were replaced in JOHNNY MNEMONIC with bland big city vistas filmed in Montreal and Toronto, lit in drab TV movie-esque fashion by cinematographer Francois Protat (WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S). Then we have the virtual reality sequences, which aside from being horrifically dated (with the 1990s-era CGI proving inadequate in every respect) fail to fulfill the demands, narrative and otherwise, of Gibson’s script.
There are no standout performances, as directing actors was something for which Longo evidently had little-to-no aptitude. Keanu Reeves is most interesting for the contorted poses he assumes throughout the film (reminiscent of the figures seen in Longo’s iconic “Men in the Cities” print series), while Lundgren shows all too well that his bosses “had no idea what to do with” (so claims Wikipedia) his street preacher character.
Ultimately what this film needed was more: a more (or less, with the film having been initially conceived as a 1.5 million arthouse product) substantial budget, a more experienced director and screenwriter, and a more nurturing studio, with the viewer forced to settle for less.
Vital Statistics
JOHNNY MNEMONIC
TriStar Pictures/Alliance Communications
Director: Robert Longo
Producer: Don Carmody
Screenplay: William Gibson
(Based on a short story by William Gibson)
Cinematography: Francois Protat
Editing: Ronald Sanders
Cast: Keanu Reeves, Dolph Lundregn, Dina Meyer, Ice-T, Takeshi Kitano, Denis Akiyama, Henry Rollins, Barbara Sukowa, Udo Kier, Tracy Tweed, Falconer Abraham, Don Francks, Diego Chambers, Arthur Eng