I am starting another new series, reviews with extensive stills to convey my impressions and give a synopsis of the movie for those who may not have seen these movies.
Johnny Mnemonic is a cyberpunk fiction short story written by William Gibson. It is a shame that more, especially live action, films have not been made, but this one really captures the starting point and the essence of all of the early Gibson stories.
We are not yet to the point where we have VR internet interfaces, but many elements already exist, especially visible in the touch interfaces of handheld/mobile devices. These devices are the emerging basis for VR technology also. The neural interfaces are not here yet, but they are in development.
I am putting all of the stills in sequence from the story. We meet Johnny first, but the early scenes are not as pretty, so the first character, who really is the central driver of the story, is Jane, who morphs into Molly from the first trilogy of Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. She does not yet have such advanced augmentations as found in these later stories, but she has all the reflex and nerve upgrades.
She is a wannabe bodyguard. She is really driven towards this trade, and goes over the top in upgrading her abilities. It compounds her desperation to find work, in that her upgrades are unstable.
Dina Meyer, the actress who plays Jane, is a perfect fit for the role, in my opinion, she is beautiful, bright and very passionate.
Spider is a 'Flesh Mechanic'. That is, his business is in doing upgrades and implants. He is the one who gave Jane all her upgrades. He is played by Henry Rollins, forming part of the trinity of terribly wooden actors in this movie, the others obviously Keanu Reeves and Ice T. But the woodenness doesn't take anything away, in fact, I think it is very appropriate, since all of these characters are very geeky, geek archetypes in fact, the mercenary geek, the bodyhack geek and the underground resistance geek.
Johnny in this scene is paying attention to some mischievous children, and I really liked the use of the lensing effect of this futuristic chinese goldfish tank.
Here, Johnny receives his assignment, his flight ticket for Newark, New Jersey, and the giant data file he has to carry.
This is Jane hustling Ralphy (to be shown soon), the double-crossing employer who Jane is trying to get work through, and who Johnny gets his mnemonic courier jobs through.
Jay-Bone, played by Ice T, is the leader and visionary of a movement called the Lo-Teks whose goal is to end the corrupt corporate/government collusion that has damaged society so badly in this future scenario.
This is Heaven, the base of the Lo-Teks. It is a partially collapsed, road bridge. I am not sure what this correlates to from the 'real world', but this bridge features prominently in the first three of the Sprawl series. It is full of geeks, in something like a blend of the style of the 'new age traveler' or 'feral' or 'psychedelic rave' scene with the 'industrial' scene of the time, combined with something like the underground culture of cipherpunks and cryptoanarchists.
Ralphy is here, with his tranny and female bodyguard, both who wear facepaint in the style of the New Wave/Progressive rock style that David Bowie was a big part of. In this scene Johnny is about to have Shinji cut off his head so the stolen data can be retrieved, since it was deleted by the leakers of the data, from Pharmakom's servers. Shinji is the son of Takahashi, the current CEO of Pharmakom.
Here is Shinji, with his band of mercenaries, hot on the trail of Johnny after he escapes with the data from Pharmakom.
I like this image because it shows Ralphy and the mirky, mirrorshades reality of this futuristic world. This one precedes the previous two pictures... I tried to keep them in order, but what can you do?
This is the mysterious Anna Kallman. She is the founder of Pharmakom, and had her brain scanned and memory uploaded to the internet before she died. She is typical of the AI characters in the Sprawl series, her agenda is opaque, and like Jane, it is her passion that drives the narrative.
After rescuing Johnny from Shinji and Ralphy, Johnny and Jane get to know each other.
Johnny, being a mercenary, hustler geek, is not interested in Jane's passion to prove her skills as a bodyguard. This is a tension between them, on the surface, concealing their affection for each other, as I have heard described somewhere else as Unrequited Sexual Tension. This is central to the narrative, because Johnny would not make it without her, and she opens up his cold, closed heart. Johnny traded his job for his childhood memories, so he doesn't have much concept of a life goal or passion, so he is the yin for her yang.
Here we have Johnny operating what is William Gibson's early version of VR. Interestingly, these type of goggles pretty much already exist now, such as Occulus Rift and others. The data gloves, however, are now more or less obsolete, replaced by visual command recognition systems.
The monolithic Pharmakom tower, in Newark.
This is Spider explaining to Johnny what NAS is, the disease at the centre of the plot. Johnny brought Jane to Spider, because she had an episode of NAS. Spider's angry but resigned account of the cause of NAS is a beautiful thing to watch, and something any Henry Rollins fan would recognise as coming from his heart.
Here is Takahashi. Not his first appearance, but this is where his secretary informs him of the identity of Anna, the uploaded personality of the founder of Pharmakom.
This is The Preacher, played by Dolph Lundgren. He is a typical representative of late 80s/early 90s Jesus-travesty nutjobs in movies, another similar one appears in the movie Contact. He is almost completely cybernetically and physically augmented. He plays at being a preacher, and all his style and instruments are based on Christian imagery.
Here, Johnny and Jane learn that Johnny's overloaded memory implant contains the cure for NAS. At this point in the story, Jane's desperation relating to Johnny gets personal. Suddenly he is revealed as her savior, in her mission to become a professional bodyguard, to fix her NAS.
These two stills are from what is my favourite scene in the movie, where Johnny declares that he does not want this job as being the Savior of the World, from the disease NAS. But he cannot change the situation, so this rage is futile, and represents the death of his previous sense of self.
Another shot of Heaven, with Jay-Bone about to appear on a platform lowering towards Johnny and Jane
At this point in the story, Johnny and Jane's ice breaks. Johnny has accepted that he must risk death to get the data out of his head intact, he has fallen for Jane, as she for him, for her courage and passion, and Jane, who has seen that Johnny has a heart, after all, as well as the cure for her illness.
Here is Jones, a cyber augmented dolphin, upgraded by the Navy to hack submarines and ships computer systems. He has super fancy cryptography breaking systems. The story was written before the advances that followed, and in reality, breaking cryptography is nearly impossible.
Just a mention because I am posting this review/synopsis onto a modern cryptographic invention that Gibson did not envision, although he started to get some concept of it in later Sprawl novels. It turns out that cryptography, and distributed network systems, are a lot more powerful than Gibson expected. I read all of the Sprawl books, avidly, despite this expectable misunderstanding of cryptography, Gibson did anticipate the chaotic effects of the increase in information dispersion that the internet later brought (this story was originally written at the beginning of the 80s).
Here Anna reveals herself as a major instigator in the plot. Previously, Anna was prodding Takahashi regarding his recently deceased daughter. Now she reveals that she has been behind orchestrating much of the plot to release the cure.
These two stills are of Johnny's cyber-self, some classic computer graphics from Silicon Graphics in the early 90s.
Here, Johnny hacks - reversing cryptography, the final piece of the unlock code for the data jammed into his head. Jones helps him, by feeding his VR/neural interface feed through the dolphin's augmented codebreaking systems. The nature of the final image in the lock code sequence is particularly poetic. We don't see it until this point in the movie.
The following images are snaps of parts of the titles that I think are most interesting. The list of actors, and I thought it was quite interesting the costume designer's last name is Dimitrov, which is a slavic name, she is responsible for all the costumes, which I think are absolutely beautiful. Lastly the song list, amongst which most notably and recognisably for me was KMFDM's hit 'Virus', and we see U2, Helmet and Orbital have tracks in the movie.
I hope you enjoyed this review and plot synopsis for this classic 90s movie. I will be writing more, I have planned Underworld, the vampire movie, and Nemesis, another cyberpunk movie from a few years before Johnny Mnemonic, which I never heard of until this year.
Update:
After my first re-viewing of my next, in-the-pipes review movie, I have become even more alert to subtle details, realised things about setting, plot and characters, that I never noticed even after watching the movie over 10 times. The next post, just a little teaser, with reward time coming up soon, is going to be more nuanced and cover more details.
So, strap yourself in! If you loved this post, you are gonna be really happy you watched out for my next installment.
We can't stop here! This is Whale country!