Filmic Friday 239: Johnny Mnemonic aka SUDDENLY JONES

Johnny Mnemonic; Robert Longo dir., Alliance Communications; 1995
Also, SPOILERS AHOY

Just what in the everloving heck did I watch?!

Let me put this out there: cyberpunk might be the most underutilized and underappreciated aesthetic in filmmaking ever. There aren't many cyberpunk films, and the few there are don't tend to have budgets or starpower or... y'know... good writers. Johnny Mnemonic, however, is both the best known and best funded. It has the greatest starpower, and it even has the writer. The writer who literally invented the aesthetic.

It has William Gibson.

Yes, both of these guys are in this movie.
Yes, it's based off of the William Gibson story.
Yes, it had a budget of $40m USD

This is also, strangely enough, one of the less appreciated of the Keanu Reeves ouvre? What went wrong?

I actually kinda don't have an answer, because this movie is heckin fun.

Set in 2021 in a landscape that's really only half a degree away from our own personal late-stage capitalist hell, Johnny Mnemonic tells the tale of a man who only knows that his name is Johnny and that he had to have a great deal of his past removed to make room for an implant that turns his head into a squishy, death-prone USB drive for moving sensitive information from location to location. Since Johnny has no idea why he started doing this job to begin with, he's now continuing to do the work because he needs the money to get the implant removed and his memories restored.

I think we can all guess that this... might not really be a thing he can get done. But Johnny believes.

Now, I also believe that this movie is responsible for a bunch of the current technological designs (VR headsets, keyboard gloves, etc), and I cannot wait to show you this next image, because I really hope we get the chance to explore an internet that looks like this some day:

This is what people in 1995 thought the internet would be like in 2021.
I hope we don't disappoint them :P

The titular Johnny is, in fact, played by Keanu Reeves, who is just as good as he will be in a few years when the Matrix comes out.

Johnny has to take on a data load that's way, way too much for him to handle, so he'll die in 48 hours if he doesn't get it out of him. Unfortunately, what he's carrying is something a lot of people want, so he's constantly under threat. He hires a bodyguard (kind of by accident) named Jane (played by Dina Meyer) to protect him from the Yakuza. Jane has been altered by a doctor named Spider (played by Henry Rollins, yes that one), but he hasn't been able to really help her.

She's a total badass, though. Why does she need help?

Well, unfortunately, Jane is suffering from a new, incurable disease called NAS (Nerve Attenuation Syndrome), which is like if epilepsy and AIDS had a baby. Everyone's terrified by it, no one is willing to really study it, and there is absolutely no cure.

Meanwhile, there's a bit of gang warfare going on between the corporate police or Yakuza and a group of punks called "Lo-Teks" (low-tech). The Lo-Teks are also interested in saving people from the Black Shakes (NAS), but they are being stymied by the corporations, who have more of an interest in treatment than cure.

Also, the Lo-Teks are 100% cyberpunk.
And yes, that's Ice-T.

The Lo-Teks help Johnny when they realize he's being chased by Pharmakom, who they have suspected strongly of intentionally preventing the discovery of a cure for NAS. Unfortunately for everyone involved, the CEO of Pharmakom has hired not only the Yakuza (who turned on him and have decided to steal Johnny's payload for themselves) but also Karl the Street Preacher, a heavily modified killer for hire.

Who is also Dolph Lundgren in his last role before 2010.

Now, with both the Yakuza and Street Preacher after them, Johnny and Jane completely throw themselves on the mercies of the Lo-Teks, who shelter them in their crazy home base, Heaven, which seems to be partly suspended under an utterly decimated Brooklyn Bridge. See, the only person left who can help Johnny at this point is Jones, who lives in Heaven, that's who they have to see.

Jones was experimented on by the Navy to penetrate enemy defenses and hack into their mainframes. He was given a lot of cybernetic implants, and he was really, really good. Unfortunately, he was also the property of the Navy, so he had to be rescued by the Lo-Teks, who brought him to Heaven and took care of him.

By the way, there's no way to prepare for the batwild insanity that is the true identity of the mysterious "Jones".

...

He's a freaking dolphin.

Darwin hack you.

Seriously, there's no warning about Jones. The only animals we've seen up to this point are fish in a tank and a single rat in the underground, so it's not even clear that there are still non-vermin/non-food animals in this post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Jones is, thankfully, able to not only stop Karl the Street Preacher, he's also able to unlock Johnny's head and save his life! Jones is literally the most effective character in this movie and he can't even talk.

So what was Johnny carrying that's so important?

What do you think?

It's the cure to NAS, of course. A group of scientists were very upset that Pharmakom was going to bury the cure in favor of continued treatments that barely worked, so they gathered enough money to hire Johnny, crammed the data into his slowly liquifying brain (they didn't know he didn't have enough space), and were promptly slaughtered by the Yakuza.

So thanks to Jones and one very confused Hawaiian, 2021 was saved.

Go watch this freaking movie.

Even knowing what Jones is does not prepare you.

Go Enjoy Something!
FC