'Johnny Mnemonic' best left buried in memory

'Johnny Mnemonic' best left buried in memory

By Jason Tedjasukmana

JAKARTA (JP): With the blockbuster summer in full swing in the
States, it seems some alternative rockers off the Lollapalooza
roster have found work elsewhere -- in Johnny Mnemonic, the
latest film by New York artist Robert Longo.

Henry Rollins, the angst-rock wordsmith formerly of Black
Flag, and Ice-T, Body Count front man and all-purpose hipster
heavy (Ricochet, New Jack City) may live on the wrong side of
Newark, but they're on the right side of justice in this film of
animated anarchy. (Detroit residents must be thrilled that their
city was for once not chosen as the devastated and detritus-
ridden city of the future.) Enlisted to help Johnny (aka Johnny
Mnemonic, Just Johnny, or perhaps Just Johnny Moronic) extract
320 gigabytes of simmering data from his Keanu Reeves brain,
Henry Rollins, Ice-T and a herd of Billy Idol video extras use
their streetwise sensibilities to outsmart the Japanese yakuza
who are after Johnny's head full of bootlegged data from the
Pharmakom corporation.

Based on William Gibson's 1981 sci-fi short story of the same
name, Johnny Mnemonic picks up where Michael Jackson's Thriller
video left off, with the techno-warped mutants now leaving their
cemetery digs behind for a deluxe junkyard, or Heaven Node, in
the sky. As a video game (Sony Imagesoft has created a CD-ROM
version, sans Keanu) Johnny Mnemonic may have made for an
interesting interactive experience. Once adapted to the screen,
however, Johnny goes the way of Mario Bros or Tron in
its lack of a storyline with any significant hook or clear
purpose, leaving the viewer up a creek without a joystick.

As a passive, on-screen experience the viewer's patience is
tried as the film meanders from one post-apocalyptic set to the
next. Visualization seems to be the main preoccupation of
director Robert Longo, who, like fellow New York artists David
Salle and Julian Schnabel, is now hoping to make a painterly
splash on the big screen. Unfortunately, the artistic input of
Jean-Phillip Carp (the brilliant set designer behind
Delicatessen) and the impressive sequences of computer-animated
battles in cyberspace are not convincing enough to save the film
from its tedious dialog and mediocre direction.

Moronic

It is approximately the year 2021 and a neurological virus
called Nerve Attenuation Syndrome, or NAS, is devastating the
population. Johnny has sacrificed portions of his long term
memory, and recollection of his childhood, to embark on a
promising career as a mnemonic courier that smuggles information
by way of a computer implant in his head. On his latest
assignment, Johnny greedily feeds his head with a barrage of
information that twice exceeds his brain's storage limit, only to
find his head hemorrhaging with information that could save
humanity from the dreaded NAS virus. (Put into perspective, 320
gigabytes of information could roughly be stored on 500 CD-ROMs.)

Enter the yakuza, who want Johnny's head on a platter and the
NAS cure in their pocket. Love-interest/bodyguard Dina Meyer is
afflicted by the black shakes, an NAS side effect, and convulses
her way into Johnny's heart. The two are subsequently pursued,
much like Ola Ray and Michael Jackson, by commandos, ninjas,
angry boardroom directors and a Jesus-freak played by Dolph
Lundgren, all of whom have been contracted to bring in the bytes.
The two are then forced to seek help from the LoTeks, an
underground network of hackers dedicated to disseminating
technological truth in the face of a monolithic corporate culture
run amok.

Apart from the cliched battles and bloodletting, Keanu Reeves
has not turned in a more wooden performance since sitting his
bronzed body underneath a bodhi tree in Little Buddha, Bernardo
Bertolucci's film of equal infamy. Reeves looks as though he
could have fallen off a Longo canvas in his skinny black suit and
tie, but his comic-book character is no more animated than the
string of requisite one-liners that now plague the action-flick
genre. "Double cheese with anchovies?" is how he enters one room.
In another scene he quips, "Next time knock, Baldy," after
tossing a clean-shaven villain through a plate-glass door.

Facing decimation in one anguished moment of self-pity, Reeves
stands Moses-like on a heap of wreckage and screams, "I just want
room service, $10,000-a-night hookers and to have my shirts
laundered at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo." Not your usual last
request but quite typical of the dialog in this film, which
purports to have some deeper meaning. Keanu's credo is summed up
when he states that his life's philosophy has been to be careful
to stay in one corner in order to avoid complications. Now, much
to his dismay, he's confronted with the utilitarian task of
sacrificing his own life for the greater good of humanity.

To look at Johnny Mnemonic on a deeper level, however, would
be disingenuous. TriStar Pictures (which, not coincidentally, is
owned by Sony), spent over $35 million dollars to make a film
that would appeal to teenage vidiots, not discriminating sci-fi
filmgoers. The characters of Johnny Mnemonic are ultimately left
as flat as the paintings of Robert Longo, whose talent for
directing experimental films and rock videos is less convincing
on a feature-length film level.

And while the film's theme of globalized technology
balkanizing society into those with access and those without is a
provocative topic, the film treats the prospect as just another
work of gangster fiction. For as visual as they may seem, the
works of William Gibson, the Vancouver-based author of
Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Virtual Light and other
cyberpunk novels, may be better off left on the page.