Johnny Mnemonic (1995) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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The danger is all in his head.

Johnny Mnemonic is a high budget cyberpunk film that is so chocked full of new ideas and information, that many dismiss it as incoherent. While definitely a product of the mid-90s, the film coalesces numerous design elements to make probably the most definitive cyberpunk film, for the time.

First Impressions

Johnny Mnemonic appears to be about a data courier, played by Keeanu Reeves, who transports electronic information inside his head. He dumps portions of his childhood memory to make room. Along the way he is joined by a woman and fights a number of bad guys who also want the information. It seems to have plenty of action as well as an attempt to describe a virtual world, and is based on a story by author Willam Gibson.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

In the early days of 2021, Corporations rule the world using members of the Yakuza to carry out their will. An underground movement called the LoTeks, groups of hackers and data-pirates, resist the corporate oversight in the Info-Wars. A new plague sweeps the world known as NAS, Nerve Attenuation syndrome. It is deadly, epidemic and has no cure. Audiences are introduced to Johnny (Keanu Reeves) a mnemonic courier who smuggles data in a wet-wired brain implant. He calls his handler Ralfi (Udo Kier) for one last run before he retires. He is sent to Beijing to gather data from some scientists and transport it to the Free City of Newark, NJ. Knowing this is an important job, Johnny uses a doubler, to allow his implant to receive 160Gb–twice his normal load. Anything over that will cause leakage, and eventually end up killing the courier.

The scientists have sensitive data from the corporation PharmaKom they entrust to Johnny. Unfortunately it’s 320Gb, and it overloads his brain, causing pain and synaptic leakage. He must get the data out within three days or risk death. In order to safeguard the data, a series of three images randomly sampled from the television are placed within the data, as a checksum, with the same images faxed to Newark for decryption later. The Yakuza, hired by PharmaKom Zurich and led by Shinji (Denis Akiyama), interrupt the process, gaining two of the images, and leaving Johnny with a single piece of the code. Johnny manages to escape and makes his way to Newark.

Shinji meets with the PharmaKom CEO at their Newark high-rise, Takahashi (Takeshi Kitano), and informs him that he will recover the head of the mnemonic courier cryogenically preserved. Takahashi says that this is his responsibility and demands the two images for the download code. In Newark, Johnny confronts Ralfi about the job, but is jumped by attacked by Shinji who was given Johnny’s location by Ralfi, who is killed in the fight. Johnny is rescued by Jane (Dina Meyer), a would-be bodyguard with cybernetic enhancements. They flee into the homeless camps and slums of the city, where they meet J-Bone (Ice-T) a leader of the LoTeks.

Johnny and Jane find a safe house with computer equipment and he logs into the internet trying to find out who asked him to deliver the data. He discovers the order came from Dr. Allcome via a local Newark copy shop. The Yakuza send a virus towards him in cyberspace as the physical Yakuza head for his location in real life. When they fail, Takahashi hires Karl, the Street Preacher (Dolph Lundgren), a member of the Church of the Retransfiguration, and bounty hunter who takes jobs in order to fill his body with implants. On the run, Jane comes down with the Black Shakes, evidence of NAS, so Johnny takes her to a hospital run by Spider (Henry Rollins).

Spider reveals that he and his team, under the alias Dr. Allcome, hired Johnny. The data he carries is the cure for NAS. PharmaKom kept the information secretive in order to make more money selling treatments, instead of the cure, thereby increasing profits. Spider is unable to recover the data without help, so they take Johnny–who is having flashes of strange memories–into Heaven, the LoTek hideout, where he meets Jones, a cybernetically enhanced dolphin who helps the resistance crack data and spread their propaganda to the masses. As they begin the decryption process to save Johnny’s life, Shinji and the Yakuza, Takahashi and The Street preacher all attack.

Shinji kills Takahashi, but not before he provides the final two images to Johnny. Takahashi has been secretly helping Johnny find information, aided by a neural net AI called Anna (Barbara Sukowa). Johnny cuts off Shinji’s head with his own laser-wire and Jane electrocutes Karl. With the help of Jones, the LoTek’s help Johnny download the data, saving him, and also reveal the memory haunting the courier. Anna is in fact Johnny’s mother, as seen in a childhood memory. She was a founder of PharmaKom and now exists as a ghost in the machine. The information on the cure for NAS is released to the public on the ‘net, and PharmaKom’s Newark tower explodes into flames as a riot begins.

“All the electronics around you, poisoning the airwaves. But we still have all this s**t because we can’t live without it.” – Spider

History in the Making

Johnny Mnemonic is based on a short story of the same name by William Gibson which first appeared in a 1981 issue of OMNI magazine. It was a precursor to his seminal cyberpunk work three years later with Neuromancer, a story of a dystopian future world where humans exist in both the real world but also in cyberspace (a term Gibson coined) using man/machine interfaces, cybernetic enhancements, and augmented reality. The novel, which was influenced by Gibson’s previous short stories for “Johnny Mnemonic” and “Burning Chrome,” along with Escape from New York, was born in parallel with the visual ideas from films like Blade Runner, TRON, and Videodrome. It took over a decade for audiences to get an official look at a filmed version of part of Gibson’s world with this adaptation, though audiences are still waiting for a proper Neuromancer film, which has been in the works for decades, but is not any closer to reality.

As this film was being released, the world was just being introduced to the concept of the World Wide Web. Harken back to the days of 2400 baud dial-up modems, where internet service providers like America OnLine, CompuServe, or EarthLink allowed users to join a plethora of virtual Bulletin Board System’s and surf the burgeoning internet. It was the birth of Internet Explorer (rest is peace, old blue) and many people’s first exposure to websites. Novels like Gibson’s helped influence aspects of the development of cyberspace, while movies and television shows took elements from the cyberpunk tradition. Many of the popular sci-fi films between 1984 and 1994 had dystopian elements that can be traced back to the origins of cyberpunk. The Terminator (and Terminator 2), Robocop, The Running Man, Total Recall, Freejack, and Demolition Man all share dystopian futures populated by megalithic corporations that do more damage than good. Television also had its share of seminal cyberpunk ideas like Max Headroom and Æon Flux. It was at this time that Johnny Mnemonic was thrust into the spotlight.

Genre-fication

While a number of the films discussed above deal with certain elements of the cyberpunk genre, Johnny Mnemonic goes to the source, in an attempt to create the definitive vision of Gibson’s story. The film offers elements of the future that had been unfilmed at this point, bridging a number themes that were prevalent during the 80s slew of science-fiction media. Primarily the film continues a storied history of futuristic dystopias. The world of 2021 is dark, sometimes rainy, and contains oppressive corporations overseeing average people living in squalor. The business of PharmaKom comes before the lives of the people that it exists to serve, making the people instead serve the corporation. The lucky ones that make money and exist above the squalor, like Johnny and Ralfi, wear suits and look presentable, while the others like Jane, J-Bone, and Spider all wear scavenged rags and pieces of tech–looking like the outcasts from a Mad Max film.

Set 27 years into the future, Johnny Mnemonic uses terms and phrases to set itself apart from the present. While computer users were using dial-up modems and keyboards to access the World Wide Web, Johnny and his ilk jacked-in directly using haptic gloves, VR goggles (called eye-phones), and voice activated programs years before these things were a reality. Characters had wet-wired implants, like Johnny’s data storage, or Jane and Karl’s non-specific enhancements. It also creates a plague that threatens only the weakest and poorest citizens. NAS is shown to affect those that use black market tech, or get their work done by the less-reputable cyber-surgeons. Those that can afford the better work can avoid the perils of the commoner, which is just another way the film shows the growing divide between the rich and the poor, as was also seen in Demolition Man.

The film also was one of the first to depict a virtual internet adapted to a filmic construct. Rather than having characters just typing on computers and explaining what was happening (like films had been doing since WarGames and before), Johnny Mnemonic depicts the internet as a virtual world where the user interacts with constructs to get the data needed. It followed films like Freejack, The Lawnmower Man, and Hackers in depicting cyberspace as more than just an image on a screen. Unfortunately, by today’s standards, the imagery is woefully simplistic and doesn’t have the same visual impact as films like The Matrix would be able to produce in a few short years.

Societal Commentary

With the rise of corporations in real life and the reality of the consumer culture stemming from the 1980s, it’s no wonder that science-fiction writers chose these megalithic entities as antagonists for their near-future stories. Here the tech conglomerate PharmaKom, which is apparently a business related to medicine–given the name having the root pharma, represents all the corporations. Their sins, as outlined by the LoTeks, is their apparent creation of a cure for NAS, and the hiding of that cure. Instead, they chose to also create drugs to treat the symptoms of NAS because, as AI Anna tells Takahashi, “treating the disease is far more profitable than curing it.” It would seem far-fetched if there weren’t already stories of companies doing similar things. Takahashi ends up turning on his employer due to this realization that his own company created the situation in which his daughter passed away. In the end, he manages to do something to help Johnny, even if he was the CEO for the same company that was trying to stop the courier for leaking the information.

LoTek is an interesting misnomer. It refers to the resistance movement run by J-Bone, and sounds a lot like the words low-tech, which these people are not. They use computers and technology as much as anyone else. They have a cybernetically enhanced dolphin that helps them run the show even. The “Lo” in their name probably refers more to their status as “lower” class citizens than their abilities. They do not live in the penthouses and skyscrapers of the world. Instead they have created a world made of suspended cargo containers hoisted under the ruins of one of the New York City bridges, which they call Heaven. This also hints at their enlightenment, as opposed to Karl, the Street Preacher, who has a faux-religious sensibility. He uses the guise of piousness and the church for his own gains to smite those that he disagrees with (or against those he has been hired to kill). Instead the LoTeks are right above everything they espouse and seek to regain some equity in an already imbalanced world.

The Science in The Fiction

There was a time that the pinnacle of data storage was the 1.4Mb floppy disk (even though it was a hard plastic shell, the name is a holdover from the early computer disks which were ‘floppy’). Images took minutes to download sometimes, and people with the fastest consumer internets were able to watch video clips that measured almost 200 pixels across. So when the film mentions that Johnny can store up to 160Gb of data in his head, that seems huge! And it is a lot of information. However by actual standards in 2021, users actually work with storage capacities in TerraBytes, or thousands of GigaBytes. Volumes that were almost unimaginable two and half decades ago. The film also emphasizes that keyboards and mice are old technology. Voice activated computers, haptic gloves that allow the user to peruse cyberspace as if they were flipping through a file cabinet, and VR goggles (called eye-phones, get it?) which allowed for a 3D rendering of the ephemeral computer code were the standard pieces of hardware needed to get online.

Johnny Mnemonic also touches on the subject of Artificial Intelligence, a subject better explored in other films, but one that was also key to parts of Gibson’s early works. Here the AI is a form of an actual person that has been uploaded (downloaded?) into a computer, and retains elements of their humanity via code. It touches on a term (once in the opening crawl, and then mentioned by the woman Johnny sleeps with) called Ice. This is never explained in the film, but in cyberpunk novels it is an acronym for Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics, with Black ICE being countermeasure that can kill intruders. Johnny encounters something akin to this when the Yakuza release a virus towards him in cyberspace. Being that he’s using a neural interface to communicate with the internet, viruses in this cyberspace are much more dangerous to end users. Instead of frying your computer, you can fry your mind. These ideas would be touched on in other films throughout the decade in better ways, but their inclusion here represents some of the first visualizations to a mass audience.

The Final Frontier

While Johnny Mnemonic represents a huge step forward in the depiction of a computer connected future, it doesn’t do it in a way that is amazingly cohesive. A lot of the ideas presented above are interesting and might be able to provide intriguing elements for any movie. Here, a lot of these ideas are thrown in apparently haphazardly and left up to the audience to make sense of. It is not something that comes from a single viewing. This makes Johnny Mnemonic a “miss” for most audiences. Even though there’s a lot of ideas, they are not presented coherently enough to make sense to a 1995 audience. To a 2022 audience they might seem old-hat or even simplistic, as the computer graphics are. But the film still functions as an introduction to a future world that would get developed further in future movies.

Films like Strange Days, and of course Keanu Reeves’ The Matrix further examine dystopian worlds and cyberspace with stronger themes and depictions than Johnny Mnemonic. As technology in the real world advanced, and the real internet took further hold of people’s lives, the depictions became better, and even more frightening as the fiction on screen mirrored the worst aspects of reality. To some extent, Johnny Mnemonic seems like a satire–not as much as Demolition Man, but in some of its use of stereotypes and archetypes which tend to gloss over the real meat of the situation. Yes, it’s simplistic in its portrayals and themes, but it is really a 1.4Mb idea created at the birth of the internet. It would take time for that data to bloat into the complex constructs that now occupy early 21st century Sci-Fi Saturdays.

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