I want room service.
>> Before we proceed,
yes we know that Johnny Mnemonic has a 13% on Rotten Tomatoes.
And yes, we know that Keanu's performance was nominated for
a Golden Raspberry Award.
And yes, we know the director Robert Longo said in an interview about the film,
all of a sudden I'm directing a movie and quietly going, wait a minute.
I really don't know how to do this, holy (Bleep).
Where do we put these cameras?
But you know what?
We here at CineFix are suckers for dystopia.
And the 90s and the Gibson Keanu combo ultimately paved the way for
the Matrix, so.
>> Whoa!
You scared the bejesus out of me.
William Gibson’s Johnny Mneumonic and his short story anthology laid the groundwork
for his novel Neuromancer, which gave rise to his Sprawl Trilogy.
Which seeded the sci fi tropes that dominated pretty much
all sci fi from that moment on.
>> Johnny Mneumonic first appeared as a short story in an Omni science
fiction magazine in 1981.
It attracted the attention of acclaimed painter and sculptor, Robert Longo.
And the visionaries teamed up to adapt the groundbreaking dystopian tale into
a low-budget $1.5 million art house film.
Unfortunately you've never seen that film.
Nobody has.
Apparently, $1.5 million was too hefty a price tag for a movie about a data
trafficker who uses his modified brain as a transport device for
highly sensitive information.
That was, until- >> It's called the World Wide Web and
it's selling like blow in a nightclub bathroom.
>> Sony Pictures figured cyberspace stories meant big business.
And so the intended $1.5 million art house film ballooned into a $30
million action blockbuster.
And the differences between the source material and
the movie are nearly infinite.
So let's jack in our noggins for a dangerously,
overcapacity upload because it's time to ask, what's the difference?
>> Who the (Bleep) are you anyway?
>> Johnny.
>> Johnny who?
Just Johnny.
>> The adaptation of Johnny Mnemonic could actually be a case study in the narrative
deviance that goes down when a studio tent qualifies a short story.
The studio's first order of business, expand the scale.
>> The movie begins with an explanatory text detailing the battle between
the Low Teks and powerful corporate overlords with Yakuza mercenaries.
The conflict catalyzed by a modern plague known as nerve attenuation syndrome, aka,
the black shakes.
The short story features Johnny,
a human hard drive capable of smuggling black market data in his brain.
And his body guard, Molly Millions, who Johnny hires to protect him against
the Yakuza assassin that's after a stolen program residing in Johnny's head.
Ultimately climaxing with a showdown surrounded by a gang of low tech outcasts.
All in all, the story features approximately seven distinct scenes,
plus an epilogue, and no more than half a dozen characters.
>> But the movie is stuffed with textbook studio exec maximalism.
>> Where's the bathroom?
>> Johnny recklessly overloads his mental circuit's memory banks in order to pay for
a full restoration of the childhood memories he sacrificed when he hollowed
out his brain for digital storage.
After his pickup goes awry with the shootout and
the scattering of a three image password needed to access the data in his head,
poor Johnny now carries a ticking cranial time bomb.
If he doesn't get the data out in 24 hours by either tracking down the image
passcode or getting mind hacks, he won't have much of a brain left to restore.
>> Unfortunately,
the movies plot's first act resulted in far more simplistic characters.
For instance, in the original story,
the low Tex underworld character is a murderously badass, self-made dog boy with
Doberman teeth and plants in a face described as a mosaic of canine scars.
Freaking cool.
In the movie, however, it's Ice-T.
>> Low-tech style.
>> And rather than the short story's nameless assassin in a Hawaiian shirt
whose detachable thumb reveals a slicing monomolecular filament,
the movie gives us a run of the mill assassin in the character Shinji,
whose thumb weapon is more laser like and familiar.
>> Aah!
>> But the most glaring case of watering down occurs with the movie's female lead.
We got parents and stuff.
>> You got parents and stuff?
>> In the story, Molly Millions is an opportunistic surgically modified muscle
for hire, driven by lust for violence and strict professionalism.
She's got mirrored lenses embedded into her eyes and
retractable blades under her fingernails.
Her presence is intimidating, to say the least.
But in the movie, Molly's character is replaced by Jane, a wannabe bodyguard and
wild-eyed love interest with a case of nerve attenuation syndrome.
She's far less imposing, blinking with totally normal eyes and
wielding a razor whip.
>> She's a babe with a whip.
Teenage boys are going to be waling on themselves.
The studio execs gone wild also spawned the creation of entirely new characters.
For instance, both Henry Rollins and
Dolph Lundgren's characters flat out didn't exist and gets into original text.
There was no underworld doctor named Spider who figures out that the gigabytes
in Johnny's head contain the cure for nerve attenuation syndrome.
>> The setup of Johnny Mnemonic having to choose between Spider fatally hacking
his brain in order to save humanity, including his afflicted companion Jane, or
to selfishly continue on in an unlikely quest to find salvation elsewhere in
dystopia is wholly original to the movie.
After paving a moral fork in the road for Johnny, Ivan Drago steamrolls in wearing
a (Sound) >> That is mine.
>> The funny thing is from a narrative standpoint the creation of these new
characters seems somewhat redundant.
You already have your menacing cat in the cat and
mouse pursuit with the Yakuza assassin, Shinji.
So there's really no need for Dolph's jacked up Jesus Christ.
Not to mention that both mediums there's already Jones.
>> The dolphin developed by the Navy with super conducting quantum interference
detectors capable of hacking Johnny's mind.
>> It's a fish.
>> Though movie Jones is a powerful player in a low tech revolution rather than
the short story's aging sideshow attraction with a drug problem,
his ability to hack Johnny's mind renders the Spider character pointless.
>> But we still have this (Bleep) because we can't live without it.
>> And just when you think it can't get any more bloated,
the movie's climax reaches new heights of redundancy,
resulting in the rarely seen hat on hat on hat triple bad guy kill sequence.
>> Hat one.
>> Shinji.
(Music)
>> Hat two.
>> Aah!
(Music)
>> Hat three.
>> Aah!
(Laugh) It's violence I don't have to think about.
>> Yeah, this final smackdown takes place in the stronghold base of the low techs,
known as Heaven in the movie.
>> But in the short story, it's a low-tech ghetto suspended above Night Town.
While the book describes candlelit hovels and
a ritualistic fighting arena complete with a metal trampoline floor that
resonates sound through its wall amplifiers.
Roger Ebert caustically described the film set of Heaven as
the abandoned flame factory.
Making a dig at the recycled late 80s,
early 90s action movie look of random fire geysers in an industrial gloom,
which hints at the near cosmic irony of the film.
The groundbreaking 1981 source material ignited the cold fusion mega reactor of
all cyberpunk sci fi to follow.
But by the time Johnny Mnemonic was finally made, the dystopian genre that
Gibson created had already been chewed up and spat out by corporate media giants.
So instead of wowing audiences with its originality,
a movie about revolting against the insidious creep of
conglomerates in our heads plays like a conglomerate constructed retread.
Fashioned from MTV scraps, sci-fi action set
pieces you've already seen in everything, including Mario Brothers.
Including Mario Brothers, Clint.
Do do do do do.
>> What the (Bleep) is going on?
>> The short story ends after Molly defeats the assassin in a gladiator style
battle above Nighttown.
Johnny and Molly end up living together.
And they go into business with Jones, who is able to retrieve the program from
Johnny's head so they can keep the Yakuza at bay.
That is, until the book Neuromancer, where, well, you could just read it.
The movie, meanwhile, gives Johnny more agency in the story's conclusion.
He chooses to risk his life for
humanity, hacking his own brain with the help of Jones.
Then regaining fragments of memory from his childhood birthday party and
beaming out the cure to nerve attenuation syndrome via a pirate satellite hookup.
Resulting in the Pharmacon building inexplicably bursting into flames.
>> (Laugh) This is 320 gigabytes of sheer lunacy bursting in my prefrontal cortex.
>> Ooh, I think you got the black shakes.
>> Seriously, you know what, though?
It still has a psychic quantum dolphin.
>> Man, I love Johnny Mnemonic.
>> That's all for this week.
Be sure to like this video and
subscribe to Cinefix for more movie data uploaded into your mental mainframe.
>> Kids love mainframe.
You gotta say the word mainframe, though.
You call it database and everybody's going to think you're a nerd.
(Music)