K o r o v a M u l t i m e d i a World Wide Web http://www.korova.com http://www.chromejob.com ~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~- 06/18/95 JOHNNY MNEMONIC, Wr. by William Gibson from his short story, Dir. by Robert Longo (Tri-Star), 1995. William Gibson's own brand of high-speed, down-and-dirty cyberpunk (he practically invented the genre) fiction lands on the big screen in a collaboration with artist Robert Longo. That's not news. What's news is that it works ... for the most part. It's actually a pretty simple tale, adapted from one of his minor short stories. Johnny is a wet-wired mnemonic courier: an information smuggler who's cybernetically enhanced his own brain to hold about 1.6 Gigabytes of hard data, give or take some megs. It's not easy, and he's apparently had to offload some of his own memory to make room for the trade -- his long-term memories, like ... his entire childhood. Once in a while he has vague flashes of his past, like a ghost that haunts him. But for the most part, he wouldn't know his own mother if she lashed him with a nerve whip. In order to earn the money required to restore his past, as it were, he takes on a high risk job in Beijing, dealing with some traitors from an international drug company. He takes the risk of loading double what his head should hold, and the result is synaptic seepage, a condition that will literally destroy his head in about 24 hours. Unless he can deliver the data. Data, it turns out, that is stolen corporate information. Data, it turns out, that EVERYONE wants. That's the problem. Immediately after the upload, Yakuza hitmen crash the party, and part of the 3-image code that's needed to unlock his head is lost to the hitmen, and the other half is hidden somewhere in a fax reception site in America. Johnny's off on a race to find a way to download the data, maybe collect his money, and hopefully not lose his head in the process. It's a familiar crime story plot device, but Gibson gives it a loaded 21st-century jolt. His idea of sci-fi is just the present tense with all the volume knobs turned up, but that's not what makes JOHNNY thrash. Gibson's stories are full of very bad characters and very sudden toss-ups, rather like Elmore Leonard meeting Dashiell Hammett at a speed party. Shifty brokers, Yakuza armies, maniacal hitmen, corporate gangsters and underground rebels all exist in a totally decadent, ultra-wired world where information is the only commodity left that isn't instantly disposable. Oh, yeah, a sense of humanity is certainly a liability. (One hitman, The Preacher -- played with uncommon zest by Dolph Lundgren -- is so full of machinery, that he's gone psychotic, and exists as only a shadow of his former, organic self.) The film would be campy (and still is in parts), but Longo is a punk rock fan, and this sensibility runs through the entire film. It IS a punk film, with rapid cutting, keening edginess and rushed storytelling. The filmmakers' fatal flaw, though, was in letting the film digress into a conventional action film, much like TOTAL RECALL, with lots of guns and explosions and deep issues that effect the human race. It would've played smoother as a rapid-fire drama that never extended beyond the characters' own worlds. Below the banal skin of a action/romance potboiler, though, are some rather interesting statements about humanity and knowledge in the near future. At its core, the film is about duality: every character has given up something to attain something else. Female bodyguards give up their femininity to build muscle; one is "juiced" up to be so fast, she can't hold still. This duality pervades the essential issue, that everything has a value (money) ... and a relevance (what it's worth). This couldn't be truer in the issue of data versus knowledge. The pharmaceutical corporation is holding back the data for a cure to a devastating illness, since the drugs they already sell to control NAS (Neural Attenuation Syndrome) are so profitable. A top executive refuses to put his daughter's death in perspective, instead reviewing old videos over and over again. The bodyguard who helps our hero has given up much of her softness to become a killer babe, literally. And Johnny has relinquished his fundamental memory, which defines who he is, to carry whatever data will finance the high life. The result is that he's now a dull, no-nonsense anyguy, played pretty damn convincingly by Keanu Reeves (who tends to be rather cardboard in action roles, anyway). In Johnny, the issue is on fire. He's given up who he was to become what he is: a fast-talking, workaholic who sleeps in expensive hotels with fancy whores, and can't deal with his life falling apart when he can't find a deal. Suddenly his past memories are priceless, and are worth flushing away a cure to save the world. The choice to made would be difficult enough to a man with some humanity, but to a cocky hustler with no sense of where he came from,... THIS is where the suspense of JOHNNY MNEMONIC lives. Even as a speedfest little action picture, with only hints of BLADE RUNNER and THE LAST DAYS OF MAN ON EARTH thrown in as spice to what is essentially a punk rock story, this William Gibson film provides much to talk about after the credits have rolled. -- D.B. Spalding A self-described multicareerist, D.B. Spalding is a writer, musician, independent radio producer, computer consultant and online sysop; he writes frequently about music, film, computing and the mass- and multimedia. (C) Copyright 1995 D.B. Spalding. All rights reserved.