This Week In Retro: Johnny Mnemonic (1995) (Patreon)

May 26, 1995: I want to get online I NEED a COMPUTER

by Diamond Feit

The internet: Without it, I'd spend way more of my life at the post office and I doubt I would have ever considered myself a writer. We tend to think of the internet as a Clinton-era innovation because the World Wide Web went public in 1993, but like fax machines and mobile phones, the underlying technology dates back decades earlier.

Internet access spread fast in the 90s, expanding from college dorm rooms to suburban bedrooms. I got my first email address in 1994 and within two years I was chatting with complete strangers via a Netlink adapter for my Sega Saturn. Every romantic relationship I've ever had began as an online conversation, which means that my children owe their existence to the very same network I now use to share these words with you.

During these years of rapid growth, awareness of the internet generally outpaced actual usage. For most people, "logging on" represented little more than a curiosity. As Homer put it in a 1995 episode of The Simpsons, "The information superhighway showed the average person what some nerd thinks about Star Trek." He's right, of course; my earliest website included an entire page dedicated to my thoughts on the final season of The Next Generation.

Obviously, a red-hot technological innovation that had everyone talking but which few people understood proved fertile ground for Hollywood. Alongside other science-fiction thrillers like Virtuosity and Strange Days, 1995 featured a number of movies focused on internet savvy protagonists. In The Net, a reclusive Sandra Bullock discovers danger lurks in every corner of cyberspace. In Hackers, super cool teens rollerblade around New York City and use their programming skills to topple a corrupt corporation.

Unlike those contemporary adventures all set in the 90s, another movie that year took a more predictive approach. 30 years ago this week, Johnny Mnemonic debuted in theaters nationwide, offering a dark vision of our online future.

Via an opening text crawl, Johnny Mnemonic welcomes us to "the second decade of the 21st century" where "Corporations rule" and "The world is threatened by a new plague." These first few lines certainly hit different in 2025 than they did in 1995, let me tell you.

We meet our protagonist right away, a Mnemonic Courier named Johnny played by Keanu Reeves. Johnny—last name unknown—makes a living smuggling data inside his "wet-wired brain implant." His expensive-looking date walks out of his hotel room and he gets right down to business by calling his agent Ralfi on the television. You can tell Ralfi's untrustworthy because he's smoking and because he's played by Udo Kier, a German character actor who has made an art out of portraying villains, vampires, and all manner of sinister looking Europeans.

Johnny wants out of the courier business which means he wants his cranial implant removed and is willing to spend his substantial savings to do so. Ralfi tells Johnny he can't afford that operation unless he takes one last job, so Johnny hurries to Beijing where demonstrators square off against armored police officers in protest of their government's response to the pandemic and I swear this movie came out 30 years ago.

Johnny immediately clocks his customers as strangers to the underworld but writes off his reservations since their money is as good as anyone else's. The exceptionally nervous men give Johnny a first-class ticket to Newark, New Jersey so he can sneak a whopping 320 gigabytes of data into the United States. Again, Johnny hesitates as his storage capacity maxes out at 160 gigs but in the end he keeps his cool and acts as if this increasingly unorthodox deal is just another day at the office for him.

Johnny tells the clients how to encrypt the data and create a unique download code which only they can see, ensuring that Johnny cannot betray their trust and deliver their data to someone else. After uploading, they can fax the code to their colleagues in Newark who will meet Johnny upon his arrival and retrieve the data. Having explained everything out loud for the audience to hear, Johnny plugs a cable into his head, puts in a plastic mouthguard, and starts the transfer.

As one might expect, today is not just another day at the office for Johnny as this one last job puts him in constant danger. By overloading his cerebral implant, Johnny experiences throbbing pains, hallucinations, and will die from something called synaptic seepage if he doesn't offload his digital burden. Making things worse, armed men storm the room and shoot everyone right after he completes the transfer; Johnny manages to escape with one third of the download code but the bad guys nab a piece for themselves.

Johnny takes that first-class flight to The Garden State but discovers few reasons to feel relief back in the U.S. His agent Ralfi sends Johnny into a waiting ambush which includes one of the same gunmen from Beijing. Johnny confronts Ralfi only to receive a torrent of bad news: The Yakuza want Johnny's head (literally) because the data he's carrying belongs to PharmaKom, a multinational corporation seemingly staffed solely by gangsters. Seriously, the local branch manager—played by Takeshi Kitano—has a full back tattoo and talks down to deadly assassins without hesitation.

Johnny thus finds himself in the unenviable position of juggling multiple threats with precious few allies in his corner. The Yakuza remain committed to tracking him wherever he goes. When Johnny evades them one too many times, PharmaKom calls in a ringer in the form of the Street Preacher portrayed by Dolph Lundgren. This cybernetically-enhanced hitman with a messiah complex and a crucifix shaped like a knife stomps around Newark like a Jesus-loving Juggernaut. Meanwhile, Johnny has no way to unload the files overflowing inside his head, so every minute he manages to survive his pursuers, he's one minute closer to brain death.

Johnny's only out—save for radical surgery that might leave him permanently disabled—is to find the intended recipients of the 320GB threatening to rupture his skull. His search leads him to discover Newark's underground anti-corporate community where he sees scores of people suffering from a disease they can't afford to treat thanks to PharmaKom's high prices. I'd call that a prophetic vision of 2025 but let's face it: Modern American healthcare was just as nightmarish back when Johnny Mnemonic first released.

The story of how Johnny Mnemonic became a motion picture rivals the on-screen antics in terms of drama. Artist, photographer, and music video director Robert Longo wrote a screenplay based on William Gibson's eponymous short story. Longo initially imagined the project as a modest production, seeking a million dollars or so to bring it to life. Speaking to the L.A. Times in 1992, Longo said "We were about a month away from pre-production in 1990 when Warner Bros. got bought by Time-Life and everything got put on hold."

After Longo successfully helmed an episode of Tales From the Crypt, studios renewed their interest in funding Johnny Mnemonic as a feature-length film. "Carolco wound up buying the rights to the script and hired William Gibson to do a rewrite," Longo said, though the influx of cash came with baggage of its own. In a 1995 pre-release interview with the L.A. Times, Gibson said "At first we were looking for $2 million to make a black-and-white movie, but nobody was interested in funding what in effect would’ve been a giant student film…We shifted from art movie to big movie because that was the kind of money we were able to get."

Studio money also brought movie stars into the mix. Keanu Reeves agreed to play Johnny and shooting started in early 1994. At that point, Keanu was already famous thanks to the Bill & Ted films and Point Break. Yet everything changed once Speed premiered during Johnny Mnemonic's production, elevating Keanu to bankable action lead status. Suddenly Longo's directorial debut became a summer blockbuster opening on Memorial Day weekend against family comedy Casper and eventual Best Picture winner Braveheart.

I don't need to tell you that Johnny Mnemonic underperformed financially in the face of crowd-pleasing epics, but critics also found few reasons to recommend Longo and Gibson's sci-fi yarn. In a two-star review, Robert Ebert wrote "[Johnny Mnemonic] doesn't deserve one nanosecond of serious analysis but has a kind of idiotic grandeur that makes you almost forgive it." Caryn James panned the film for The New York Times, calling it "a disaster in every way."

Keanu Reeves' performance as Johnny drew much of the ire from audiences and critics alike. Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman wrote Keanu "looks like a futuristic G.I. Joe, and damned if he doesn’t have all the personality of G.I. Joe." Caryn James lambasted his "robotic delivery." Even today, decades later, you can find listicles and YouTube videos highlighting Johnny Mnemonic as Keanu at his worst, particularly his third act monologue where Johnny rants about the finer things in life while bellowing "I WANT ROOM SERVICE" on the empty streets of Newark (though shot in Montréal).

While I already had a fondness for Keanu Reeves and a growing interest in the internet in 1995, I don't recall if I saw Johnny Mnemonic in theaters. I do know it became a cable mainstay and I found it oddly compelling. Roger Ebert rightly ridiculed the concept of a Mnemonic Courier physically transporting data around the world in his review but if you accept the film's far-out premise, it's a fun watch thanks to its cohesive worldbuilding and the absolutely stacked cast.

One of the most memorable sequences is when Johnny logs on to do some detective work. Instead of clicking a mouse or swiping on a touch screen, he dons a visor and articulated gloves. Even though he doesn't touch anything, this equipment turns surfing the web into a fully-immersive tactile experience. Johnny sees bits of code flying around as he inputs queries, manipulates widgets, and visualizes domains as bespoke structures.

Obviously, no one in the 21st century actually uses the internet like this, but in 1995 when the entire concept of a global connected network of computers blew our minds, a gesture-driven goggle-based interface didn't strike me as impossible. Three years before Johnny Mnemonic premiered, The Lawnmower Man imagined virtual reality environments that stimulated all our senses and tapped into our primitive psyches. Considering the pace at which graphics had improved since then, no vision of future technology seemed out of reach.

It's almost funny how far Johnny Mnemonic misses the mark in presenting 21st century hardware and communication practices. No one uses a cellphone, not even once; all calls involve a fixed video monitor, be it in a phone booth, a taxicab, or in the Street Preacher's case, a bible. No one uses Bluetooth or other wireless protocols as Johnny's custom equipment requires cabled connections—including his cranial implant.

Johnny's implant struck me as the most behind-the-times component of the film. He says the operation forced him to sacrifice a portion of his own memories but his capacity tops out at 160 gigabytes. In the real 21st century, any consumer can buy a fingernail-sized microSD card that safely stores six times as much data, no surgery required.

Johnny Mnemonic opened ahead of all the other sci-fi films I mentioned above, but its disappointing theatrical performance relegated the film to pop culture obscurity. Ask anyone today about "the Keanu Reeves movie where he explores cyberspace" and 99% of respondents will offer The Matrix for an answer. William Gibson continued his career as a writer across many mediums. Robert Longo never directed another feature film, but he returned to his other disciplines and kept making art.

Over time Johnny Mnemonic morphed from a punchline to a cult film thanks to Keanu's ongoing star status. As its 25th anniversary approached, Longo considered re-editing the film into something closer to what he imagined. His goal, according to a 2021 interview with Screen Slate, was to "try to get some redemption in relation to this film, because making it was really difficult."

Instead, Longo cut nothing but Johnny Mnemonic's colors to turn it into a black & white film like he originally intended. That might sound superficial but it makes for a radically different viewing experience; Longo says "it looks like a shitty, million-dollar movie. It has a bit of a grunge to it and an attitude to it, which I think is really great." Today, you can purchase this edition of the film as its own Blu-ray or watch it on iTunes bundled with the full-color original.

Watching Johnny Mnemonic today, 30 years after its release and four years after its chosen setting, I'm more captivated by the film than ever. It's easy to point and laugh at the things it gets "wrong" about the 21st century just as it's a little eerie to observe what it got "right," but Robert Longo and William Gibson never set out to actually predict everyday life in 2021. Good science-fiction always examines and comments upon the present through a veil of fantasy. Greedy corporations, extreme wealth disparity, and diseases that disproportionately affect the poor are not new problems.

Robert Longo said all of this back in 1995. "The film doesn't try to create an impression of the future," he told the L.A. Times, "because I think for children of the '50s, the future already happened. The future is an idea that's come to seem obsolete and I'm already nostalgic for the future." Johnny Mnemonic makes me nostalgic for a time when I thought we were all getting cool implants that gave us superpowers. Instead, we're more likely to find ourselves angrily looking up at high-rise buildings, lamenting the many promises capitalism has left unfulfilled.

Writer/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but xer work and opinions exist across the internet.