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| Courtesy: 101 Films |
Johnny Mnemonic has been enjoying quite the reappraisal in recent years. Once a notorious sci-fi flop that was routinely used as something of a punchline, the 1995 cyberpunk thriller written by legendary author William Gibson and directed by visual artist Robert Longo has taken on new life as a cult classic with an enthusiastic following and a fascinating legacy. As Gibson's genre-defining novel Neuromancer has continued to prove weirdly impossible to adapt, Johnny Mnemonic remains one of only two major film works set in Neuromancer's cyberpunk dystopia of The Sprawl (the other being Abel Ferrara's New Rose Hotel), making it immediately notable and important for fans of Gibson's work, in spite of its flaws. Distance from its notorious box-office failure, and the career renaissance and renewed cultural appreciation of Keanu Reeves, has also allowed fans to reexamine it on its own terms, and realize that despite some messy qualities and notorious studio interference, it is a much better film than it originally got credit for, with a lot to appreciate in its gleefully maximalist world. This reappraisal has been helped by more and more fans discovering that the film exists in two cuts: in addition to the more commonly-seen 96-minute theatrical version, there exists a 104-minute director's cut (or so it is called - director Robert Longo has clarified that due to the amount of interference the film dealt with, neither version is truly his), which is generally regarded as a significant improvement. That so-called director's cut has historically existed exclusively in Japan, and until recently it hasn't been that easy to see in English-language territories outside of fan-subbed bootlegs (for those unfamiliar, the film contains quite a bit of Japanese dialogue, mainly courtesy of co-star "Beat" Takeshi Kitano), but considering the premise of the film, fans circulating contraband copies of an unavailable superior version feels like an appropriate way for Johnny Mnemonic's resurgence to be fueled. Now UK boutique distributor 101 Films has released a swanky limited edition of Johnny Mnemonic through their Black Label line, including both cuts of the film for the first time ever on an English-language release. There couldn't be a better time to re-examine Gibson and Longo's once-maligned cult classic, and see how both cuts of the film compare.
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| Courtesy: Sony Pictures/101 Films |
The dystopian cyberpunk world of William Gibson's Sprawl stories and novels is a future where governments have collapsed, and corporate empires rule the world (and more importantly, rule cyberspace) with armies of mob enforcers to do their dirty work; where data is the most important commodity in the world, and whoever controls the data has the power; where hackers have modified their bodies and brains with cybernetic implants, and can jack in to the internet directly through ports in their skulls. The year is (I kid you not) 2021, and Johnny (Keanu Reeves) is a mnemonic courier: a data smuggler who has modified his brain to work like a hard drive, and deleted his entire past to free up storage space, who traffics data that is too sensitive or dangerous to move digitally through the physical world of The Sprawl. He just took on a very lucrative job, and a very dangerous one: the data he is smuggling exceeds his brain's safe storage capacity, and the file size will kill him if he doesn't get it to its destination and offload it within 24 hours. Which wouldn't be a problem, except that the data is hot, and he soon finds himself being pursued by all sorts of dangerous people - corporate agents, Yakuza enforcers, and hitmen - who all literally want his head, preferably chopped off in a cooler. The ensuing chase takes him through a wide cross-section of Gibson's Sprawl, from luxurious hotels and corporate towers to seedy nightclubs to a rebel underground in the ruins of the past. And the world is populated by quite the ensemble of character actors, musicians, and genre film icons, including Beat Takeshi, Udo Kier, Dolph Lundgren, Ice-T, Dina Meyer, and Henry Rollins.
Johnny Mnemonic is, first and foremost, a world-building movie. Its greatest strength, though also its greatest challenge, is how completely it dives into the huge, complicated, sprawling (pun intended) world of Gibson's work, which by 1995 had been developed across a trilogy of novels (Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive) and a handful of short stories. Rather than opting for a small, more easily-digestible scale, the film drops the viewer into this fully-formed narrative universe head first. There are a LOT of ideas crammed into this movie. As if the cyberpunk concept of data couriers with modified hard-drive brains trafficking contraband information wasn't enough to base a movie around, we get a crash course on the whole social structure of the giant corporations that rule the world, the Yakuza that works for the corporations, the fringe hitmen employed by the Yakuza, and the underground of rebels unplugged from the grid - LoTeks, they call themselves - who fight the system from the outside. We get characters whose nervous systems and brains have been replaced by technology. We get a pandemic of a neurodegenerative disease ravaging this world and widening the gaps between the haves and have-nots. And we get probably Gibson's most high-concept recurring theme, the idea of human consciousness converted to AI, or AIs that have taken on human consciousness, living within the internet as sentient ghosts in the machine. It's a very ambitious amount of plot for one movie, and very much in keeping with Gibson's style of creating big, complicated futures and expecting his readers to be intelligent and catch on as they go. The movie is at its best when it is exploring this world in all of its scope and strangeness: Johnny traveling through tense political protests in Beijing to get to a meeting in a high-tech luxury hotel, illicit trades of information and violence in a neon-lit seedy bar right out of Neuromancer, and the Gilliamesque mass of cables and TV screens at the heart of the LoTek resistance headquarters. It is very clear that both Gibson and Longo feel the most passion and excitement about building this universe and its themes, both visually and thematically. Gibson has brought to the table an incredibly well-fleshed-out narrative landscape, and it has run wild within Longo's visual artist imagination, and they both want to get as much of it on-screen as possible.
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| Courtesy: Sony Pictures/101 Films |
Unfortunately for Gibson, Longo, and the film as a finished piece, this exact scope and ambition proved to be a liability when the studio started to get nervous about how complicated it all is, and decided that they didn't want a Blade Runner for the 90s so much as they wanted a fast and bombastic action movie that could cash in on Keanu Reeves' post-Speed star power. And while Gibson and Longo were both already well-established and distinguished talents in their own fields, this was mutually their first film, and as so often happens with first-time filmmakers, the studio started meddling in the film more and more as production continued, stripping away both artists' creative freedom and imposing the much less ambitious will of marketing executives. While a lot of the ambition of the project and its world-building survives and shines through, Johnny Mnemonic is unmistakably a heavily compromised film with obvious rewrites and tacked-on or dumbed-down elements, which, in the words of film scholar Rich Johnson who provides a commentary on the 101 Films disc, is largely notable for the missed potential of what it could and should have been. If Gibson's style is to create a complicated world and trust that the reader is smart enough to catch on, the studio's level of trust in its audience was pretty much the opposite: at the behest of the studio, Gibson was made to shoehorn in a whole bunch of heavy-handed exposition dumps which periodically spell out everything going on in the film, in a way that it definitely doesn't need to, and which is counter to the author's usual style. The studio also forced Gibson and Longo to create an extra prologue scene which explains the whole premise, instead of the in-media-res storytelling approach that the two had originally intended for the opening scene, and they add on an expository text crawl before that so it is literally impossible for a viewer to miss anything. The studio also meddled in the film in other ways, such as forcing Gibson and Longo to add in Dolph Lundgren's secondary villain, just so there could be another name to put in the marketing and help global box office; Lundgren's character feels very shoehorned in and narratively redundant, so this is no surprise, although at least it must be said that he is a very fun, gleefully unhinged character. It is the sort of film where you can feel the tug of war on-screen between the movie that Gibson and Longo were trying to make, which is clearly visible but just out of reach, and the heavy hands of studio interference trying to turn it into a shadow of that idea.
Which isn't to say that it's a bad or unsuccessful movie; for what a troubled production the film had, the end result is still surprisingly effective and compelling, well beyond what you might expect. I would not say that it is a film of missed potential so much as it is a film of partially-fulfilled potential, which gets at least much of the way there despite an obvious uphill battle. How much of its potential it is able to fulfill depends very much on which cut of the movie you watch (one is indeed much better than the other), but more on that in a minute. In both cuts, the film's saving graces are William Gibson's unique and inspired literary world and Robert Longo's eye as a visual artist: the two things that no amount of studio interference could fully dull. Even if the obvious rewrites are clunky, you can tell that (at least in its original form) William Gibson's script was a good one, and enough of the structure and intelligence of that good script are there to make the film, its universe, and its ideas absolutely fascinating; even with its flaws, it gives you a lot to chew on. And thanks to Longo's visual talent and eye for art design, the movie looks absolutely great. The visual side of filmmaking is clearly where Longo is most comfortable, and where he really flourishes. There are places where you can see the film straining against the constraints of budget, time, and studio interference, but overall Longo and company really nailed it. If you are a fan of Gibson's written work it is pretty amazing how well The Sprawl is visualized on-screen; having read Neuromancer before I ever saw this film, in a lot of ways this is exactly how I pictured it, and I can't think of a better compliment than that.
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| Courtesy: Sony Pictures/101 Films |
Even the CGI looks pretty cool, albeit in a camp, throwback way. The CGI in the film has, by most objective metrics, aged poorly: it's a film from 1995, after all, and it looks like it, maxing out at maybe a Dreamcast level of quality. But because the film only uses CGI to depict what's going on in Cyberspace (as in, Gibson's pre-internet sci-fi vision of what the internet might be like in the future, as a virtual-reality domain), the visuals don't end up looking "dated" so much as they look stylized; realism isn't what they're going for, and they lean into the digital look of it very deliberately. The neon colors, unfolding geometries, and deliberately-artificial world of data honestly looks quite cool, in much the same way as the original Tron, and while it instantly screams 1995 in a way that causes these sequences to take on a major air of nostalgic throwback campiness, that's all part of the fun. This is one of those movies that is probably MORE fun because of how very, very 90s it feels, and not less.
What has aged startlingly well, however, is the film's predictions of the future: like all good grounded-in-reality sci-fi writers, William Gibson was impressively, eerily prescient. Sure, it's easy to nit-pick the tech predictions that wound up being way off; the way we use the internet is obviously pretty mundane in comparison to the motion-controlled VR experience that Gibson envisioned, and the way that 320GB of data is repeatedly referred to as an astronomically large amount is easy to chuckle at in this age of terabyte SD cards, so it's easy to forget that these were pretty forward-thinking predictions for the first half of the 90s. But his prediction that by 2021 data would be one of the most valuable and coveted resources out there, that corporations would value the acquisition of data above all else, and that true power boils down to controlling the flow of data online? Pretty darn accurate. The vision of his dystopian future as a late-stage-capitalist (or as he words it, "age of terminal capitalism") hellscape where corporations are more dominant than governments because of how they control and commodify cyberspace? Sounds about right. And the biggest doozy of them all: his dystopian 2021 is ravaged by a global pandemic, and one of the opening scenes finds Johnny in the midst of an N-95-wearing crowd of protesters in Beijing, protesting how the government is handling the pandemic response. Watching Johnny Mnemonic in 2022 is a very strange experience, as alarmingly close-to-home predictions of the dystopian future right around the corner collide with purely-1995 moments of techno-camp. The film may occasionally be a bit more disconcerting now than it was back then, but in many ways it probably works better, as aspects of its plot feel even more plausible than when they were first written, but the fun throwback elements stop it from feeling too heavy. It's a genuinely fun film to revisit from 2022.
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| Courtesy: Sony Pictures/101 Films |
With all of that said, though, the film has some other major flaws that cannot be chalked up to studio interference. What I said about how Robert Longo is clearly most comfortable with directing the film's visuals? Unfortunately that seems to be the only part of directing where he felt truly comfortable on his first feature. Judging from the on-screen evidence, his directing of actors ranges from acceptable to pretty bad. His cast has an impressive array of big names and familiar faces, but when it comes to actual acting talent, they are an uneven bunch. Keanu Reeves can be great in the right role, or terrible in the wrong role; here he is okay at best, but has some pretty bad moments, and his performance is a far cry from the one he would give just four years later as Neo. Dina Meyer (of Starship Troopers fame) does the best she can, but being a first-time actress working with a first-time director is a thankless combo. But even fan-favorite actors who are usually great, like Beat Takesi and Udo Kier, are not at their best here, coming off as fairly wooden and not utilizing their powerful personalities as memorably as they do in their best roles. It just seems like Longo struggles to get good performances out of his actors, and struggles with how to handle the tone of the script. Probably the best performance come from Henry Rollins, probably because he is more or less playing an exaggerated, cyberpunk version of himself. The same can be said about the movie's action sequences: in general they feel a bit stiff, and while certainly not bad, they are not very memorable either. Once again, this seems to come down to Robert Longo not feeling as comfortable directing action as he is directing visual artistry and world-building.
The film is largely able to overcome these deficiencies in acting quality and action because those weaknesses tend to be outweighed by the big, maximalist visual storytelling and wild cyberpunk ideas which are absolutely the star of the show. None of these flaws are dealbreakers; they are just all part of the movie's weird mix of things that really work and things that just don't. It's an odd film to watch, because it veers back and forth between times when it genuinely is a good cyberpunk movie and a good William Gibson adaptation, and times when it feels more like a guilty-pleasure fun-bad movie. But in either mode, it is never boring, and is always very compelling, memorably strange, and highly watchable. It definitely can be debated how good the movie is, and how successful it is in realizing its vision, but there is no denying that it is a lot of fun, if this kind of fascinatingly flawed movie is your cup of tea and you are willing to go along for the ride. With its bizarre behind-the-scenes saga showing so clearly in the troubled final product, it is the kind of movie that is just as fascinating for its flaws as for its successes, and just as fascinating for the glimpses of the movie that it could have been as for the movie that it is. It is the type of film that is best watched with knowledge of its troubled creation, but which is all the same very much worth a look.
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| Courtesy: Sony Pictures/101 Films |
Which brings us to the question of the two cuts: now that both versions are readily available on an English-friendly blu-ray release (though unfortunately only a region-B one for the time being), how do they compare, and which is the one to watch? I had seen the extended cut/Japanese director's cut previously on a bootleg DVD, and I absolutely had the sense that it was better, but until watching both cuts back to back on this set I hadn't fully appreciated how much better. There is no question - the extended cut is the way to go, by a wide margin. It may only be 8 minutes longer, but I was very surprised just how big a difference those 8 minutes make. The theatrical cut, as it turns out, exacerbates the worst of the film's problems due to its studio interference: in the interest of making a faster-paced, more action-forward movie, they cut it down to pretty much the shortest runtime it could possibly be, narrative cohesion and character development be damned. Certain plot points feel incredibly rushed and underbaked, and at least one key character - Beat Takeshi's corporate-funded Yakuza boss Takahashi - is obviously underdeveloped in a way that severely undermines his arc, and robs his actions at the end of the film from having much weight. You can sense that there are scenes missing from the theatrical cut, and there is a whole lot of messy telling-not-showing. Giving the film 8 more minutes of room for the plot and characters to breathe makes all the difference.
The extended/Japanese cut adds a few full additional scenes, developing Johnny's dilemma at the beginning of the film, and developing the characters of Takeshi's Takahashi, Lundgren's Street Preacher, and the ghost-in-the-machine PharmaKom AI. Takahashi especially benefits from these additional scenes, as he is elevated from a fairly flat villain to a more complex character with a sympathetic side, as a grieving father struggling to find his place in the world now that his only child is dead and the next generation of Yakuza enforcers are threatening his leadership. This character development really helps sell the plot developments of the last act, and Beat Takeshi actually gets some compelling scenes to work with as an actor, and no longer feels so wasted by the movie. No amount of extra scenes can make Lundgren's hitman-priest feel like anything more than a weird, shoehorned-in afterthought, but the extra material he gets here helps him fit into the film at least somewhat better, and adds to how much fun he is as an odd, out-there character in his own right. Adding an extra scene to introduce the concept of the sentient, sympathetic AI, however, is hugely helpful. This is by far the most high-concept of Gibson's ideas to make it into the film, and in the theatrical cut it does not feel nearly well-developed enough, and is thrown in with very little context. It works much better in this version, though it still could have used a bit more development.
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| Courtesy: Sony Pictures/101 Films |
Most of the added runtime is in small scene extensions here and there, and changes to the pacing which give scenes, character beats, and the world at large more room to breathe. Again, this makes all the difference: rather than moving along as fast as possible, there is now time for us to soak in all the information being thrown at us, and enjoy the world-building that was clearly such a focus for Gibson and Longo. The opening Beijing sequence, for instance, is quite a bit longer in a way that really gives a sense of scope and scale, and allows us to get our footing in this wild cyberpunk world before things start to go crazy. This cut also wisely loses a few things - most notably some of the most ham-fisted exposition forced in by the studio, usually in the form of looped lines that clearly weren't there on set. These small subtractions add up to make a positive difference as well. The extended cut also has a different score, which I personally like quite a bit better than the redone score for the theatrical, though mileage may vary.
Without a doubt, the extended/Japanese cut is the superior version of the film. It is the one I would recommend to anyone looking to watch the film, whether they are an established fan or a newcomer. Especially if you are a newcomer, it is a much better way to experience the movie for the first time. Most of the film's core flaws are still there, in terms of stiff action, weak acting, and baked-in artifacts of studio meddling, but it is a much better version of the nonetheless-compromised film as it exists, without the added flaws of a choppy and narratively half-assed theatrical cut. Unfortunately the extended cut only exists in SD, as a mid-2000s anamorphic DVD master, after which the 35mm elements were apparently misplaced. But it is at least a pretty nice-looking DVD master from reasonably late in the life of the format when studios knew how to make the most of it, so viewers should not find the picture quality too problematic, and it is a very fair tradeoff to get a much better version of the film.
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| Courtesy: Sony Pictures/101 Films |
I need to take a moment to discuss the 101 Films limited edition blu-ray which inspired this review, since while it is a very nice boutique release in some ways, it also has one very big shortcoming of which people should be aware before dropping £25/$31 on it. It's a mixed bag of a release to say the least, although overall I am quite happy with it. Let's start with the positives. The packaging and physical elements of the limited edition release are first rate. It comes in an Arrow-style hardbox with gorgeous new artwork that does a great job of channeling the film's cyberpunk aesthetic, and within the harbox are a thick booklet of essays about the film, and a set of reproduction lobby cards. In terms of packaging 101 Films knocked it out of the park. They also did a solid job of assembling the extras for the disc, although most of them are archival, with the only new extra being a very good film critic audio commentary. The archival extras include a bunch of short on-set interviews with William Gibson, Robert Longo, and most of the core cast, a very good and brutally honest audio commentary by Longo, a collection of behind-the-scenes footage, a vintage making-of featurette, a short film adaptation of another William Gibson story, and the movie's tie-in music video by Stabbing Westward. And of course, the main extra (and the main reason why most people will probably buy the set) is that Japanese extended cut, English-friendly for the first time. But now we get to that downside, and it's a big one (though how big depends on what you really want this set for). 101 Films did not commission a new scan of the film for this set, and instead used an off-the-shelf scan provided to them by the movie's UK rights-holders. Which isn't an issue in itself, except... the scan they were given is not good, and in fact is borderline-unacceptable that they used it on a premium release with this kind of price point. It appears to be some sort of European broadcast/streaming master, and is a 1080i 25fps PAL transfer - yes, that's right, they used an interlaced transfer with PAL speedup, on a boutique release in 2022, years past the point where that is well below industry standard for blu-rays. It clearly isn't a new scan either, as it is a little soft, and looks more like the sort of scan we would have seen in the early days of blu-rays ten or twelve years ago. That said, it isn't a terrible scan: detail is decent if a bit soft, colors and contrast look good, and overall it is perfectly watchable. It's a totally adequate version of the movie that I wouldn't think twice about if I saw it on streaming or on an older disc, even if the PAL speedup is not cool just on principle, since 24fps 1080p has been industry-standard for pretty much the whole lifetime of blu-ray as a medium. But this isn't an older disc, and it isn't on streaming; it's a supposedly premium boutique limited edition at a time when other studios are increasingly doing UHDs, and so for it to have a transfer that looks like it belongs on a disc from 2012, and that would have even been just-okay back then because of the whole PAL issue... yeah, 101 Films should have requested something better. However, the director's cut is in the proper speed/frame rate - although as I mentioned earlier, the director's cut is also trapped in SD because that's the only format in which it exists at all. It is a pretty decent anamorphic transfer though, which actually doesn't look that much worse than the somewhat soft interlaced transfer for the main feature. Both cuts clearly have problems in terms of their presentation, but at least in the case of the director's cut it is unavoidable, short of another studio coming along and doing an HD/SD hybrid, or miraculously finding the 35mm elements. If you're mainly here for the director's cut, then this release is easily worth picking up, since this really is as good as that version likely to get quality-wise and the extras are very nice; but if you want a really nice HD version of the theatrical cut, be warned that "acceptable" is all you'll find here. Which is really a bummer, because otherwise 101's set is great; it's a shame that the quality of the feature does not live up to the package it is housed in. But again, I would advise that people mainly/only watch the extended cut, so maybe that isn't such a problem after all.
Johnny Mnemonic is a flawed, compromised movie, no doubt about it. It could and should have been truly great, but a combination of studio interference and Robert Longo's inexperience directing actors conspire to hold it back. There is a lot to love about the film, especially in its extended cut, and it is much, much better than it historically has gotten credit for, but it is definitely one of those odd films that is more fascinating, compelling, and fun than it is necessarily great. At its best it is reminiscent of the quality mid-90s cyberpunk thrills of Hackers, and at worst it is reminiscent of the visually-audacious, messy camp of the Super Mario Bros movie (which, to be clear, I absolutely love also); its quality may vary, but it is always fun, and never boring. William Gibson's ambitious world-building is wonderful, and Robert Longo's eye for art design is fantastic; the film truly does look pretty great, and brings The Sprawl to life in a way that, as a Neuromancer fan, I can't help but love. It's a bit of a mess, but it's a lovable, compelling mess that I would happily recommend to those who think they are on its wavelength - especially if you can watch it in its extended cut.
Score for the theatrical version:
Score for the extended Japanese cut/director's cut:
- Christopher S. Jordan
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