Saturday 29 October 2016

Johnny Mnemonic and your dad's cyberpunk

Only recently I got to see Johnny Mnemonic (1995), based on the William Gibson short story. Given the bad reputation I found it to be surprisingly nice little film. Surely the acting and directing is not that great, but there's lot of cyber-cheese, inventive sets and visuals. These 1 and 30 minutes pack quite a punch. Thanks to Marq "the Finn" for delivering the goods.

We get to see what Internet is like in 2021:


A lot of man-machine interaction:


Why is the AI always an ethereal female?


Jacking into Cyberspace:


What it amounts to is a glorified Excel? Minority Report, eat your heart out:


Of course, the entities met in Cyberspace are distorted, disembodied heads and generally incomprehensible visuals:


In any Cyberpunk setting, The Rich live classy:


While the poor are left to collect scraps:


Big corporations piss on your humanity. Perhaps a shock to the system is in order:


And that's not nearly all! I wouldn't even think of spoiling some of the best stuff. All in all it's a pretty good visualization of Gibson's universe. It's hardly Blade Runner-quality but an enjoyable treat and possibly the most pure filmatisation of what Cyberpunk meant back in the day.


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