Hacker Cinema
Johnny Mnemonic
1995 · Film · 97 min
Directed by Robert Longo
Science FictionActionAdventure
In a dystopian 2021, Johnny is a data trafficker who has an implant that allows him to securely store data too sensitive for regular computer networks. On one delivery run, he accepts a package that not only exceeds the implant's safety limits—and will kill him if the data is not removed in time—but also contains information far more important and valuable than he had ever imagined. On a race against time, he must avoid the assassins sent to kill him and remove the data before it, too, ends his life.
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My favorite example already from the trailers was "the lady wearing mirror shades was already done in the movie Johnny Mnemonic in the 90s" and getting to explain that it is literally the same character. (Johnny Mnemonic was based on a short story that happens around the same time as Neuromancer and the character Molly crosses between the two. I, for one, am hoping the new Apple TV adaptation gives us an excuse to see at least one ex-military dolphin.)
Domingo Gonsales is flown to the moon by tying himself to wild swans, and meets Lunar Christians - The Man in the Moone by Francis Godwin (1601)
Manned mission to the Moon by giant gun - Jules Verne (1865 ish).
Manned trip around Saturn by comet - Jules Verne (1877).
Time traveller sets off to the future - H.G. Wells (1894)
Martian invasion of Earth - War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (1905)
Global telephone network reaches as many connections as a human brain and wakes up - Dial 'F' for Frankenstein, Arthur C Clarke (December 1, 1975)
Birth of Dr Susan Calvin, founding of US Robotics & Mechanical Men, development of 'Positronic Brain' - Asimov's robot stories (1982 and after)
British space station under construction - The Outward Urge by John Wyndham (1994)
Portal to parallel universes - Sliders (1994)
Doctor Samuel Beckett steps into the Quantum Leap Accelerator and vanishes - Quantum Leap (1995)
Skynet becomes self-aware - Terminator 2 Judgement Day (August 29, 1997. at 02:14 am Eastern Time)
HAL 9000 AI computer operational (1997), first human voyage to Jupiter system (2001), first landing on Europa and alien life discovered (2010) - Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 A Space Odyssey
Moon leaves Earth Orbit after nuclear waste explosion, taking human-occupied Lunar colony with it - Space:1999 (13 September 1999)
Efficient international flight, using Zeppelins and blimps - Rudyard Kipling (2000)
Global climate disaster - The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
Replicants - Bladerunner (2016)
Keanu Reeves smuggles digital information in his brain - Johnny Mnemonic (2021)
Arnold Schwarzenegger kills to survive in a typical American TV show - The Running Man (2025)
Woman relifed into robot, rich people discover workers' rights - Fritz Lang's Metropolis (2026)
First colony mission to Mars, 100 colonists on the largest spaceship ever built - Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars (2026)
Tibetan monks finish listing all the names of God, stars start going out - The Nine Billion Names of God, Arthur C. Clarke (when computers were rentable and could print 1000 names per second)
and many more: https://scifi.fandom.com/wiki/Timeline_of_fictional_future_events
This was a central plot point of the film adaptation of "Johnny Mnemonic". From Wikipedia:
> In 2021, society is driven by a virtual Internet, which has created a degenerative effect called "nerve attenuation syndrome" or NAS.
Even more hilariously given the purveyors of the distractions we're discussing in this thread:
> Megacorporations control much of the world, intensifying the class hostility already created by NAS.
Bread and circuses, etc. I believe that given our cultural trajectory one's ability to lint their cognitive intake (that is keep TikTok/Insta/YouTube/podcast garbage viewership to a minimum) will be a large predictor of success. The next generation of doctors and Nobel Prize winners probably won't be watching boobies videos and Minecraft play-throughs.
If you watch the movie johnny mnemonic, they throw around data cubes the size of a stamp. Modern nvme ssds weigh around 4 grams per TB. So we've already achieved scifi movie parity :D. The only problem is the price.
I think it’s more survival bias than recency. But I strongly agree. There were many bad movies in the 1990’s, we just don’t remember them or have forgotten how bad they were.
Two examples off of the top of my head are Johnny Mnemonic and Escape from LA. Both of these are sci fi movies that are mostly just awful throughout. I remember watching them at the time and thinking they were pretty decent, but on rewatching them recently, I could barely make it through them.
Compare that to The Matrix, just four years later (and still in the 1990s), which hits super hard and seems almost flawless even today.
Really I think the movies that have survived in people’s minds are the ones where everything aligned: an incredible director with a great story to tell and everyone involved performing at the top of their game.
Yes! and Shadowrun! I remember just binging William Gibson after that, until Johnny Mnemonic, Hackers (the movie), and Strange Days, came out. What a great decade.
People aren't romanticizing it in a positive way, they are mostly fascinated by the bleakness of it- and shocked that something they thought was relegated to fiction actually existed in real life. Much of HN grew up as nerdy kids on cyberpunk SciFi like Blade Runner, Johnny Mnemonic, and the Matrix and this looks exactly like that, which is no coincidence, because that aesthetic was largely based on Kowloon Walled City itself, unknowingly to the people consuming it.
The cyberpunk author William Gibson was aware of and inspired by Kowloon Walled City. Cyberpunk is characterized by "high tech low life" - it is seen as awful and dehumanizing, something people might want to read a book or watch a movie about, but not live themselves.
In hindsight, the whole Cyberpunk aesthetic being based on real world inhumane living conditions that actually already existed might be inappropriate by modern standards. It is making an amusing fantasy or spectacle out of other peoples suffering- however Gibson, etc. were using this setting mostly because they had a negative view about the impacts of technology on humanity, and were writing fiction to express and warn people about these concerns.
Man. Johnny Mnemonic. I get the urge to rewatch that movie once every three of for years, and I'm reminded of it's awful greatness. Like Hackers.
Need more William Gibson movies. I'm incredibly disappointed that The Peripheral was cancelled.
One of my first experiences with our home PC's was downloading wav files of movie and TV clips off of AngelFire and GeoCities sites and assigning different windows tasks to play them to prank my dad. Error dialog popup? Beavis and Butthead's "Breaking the law, breaking the law". Out of disk space? Johnny Mnemonic "I can carry nearly eighty gigs of data in my head". He thought it was hilarious and would reassign them to his own clips that he found and we continuously tried one-upping each other to find the most annoying possible sound for every windows function.
You are exposed to greater than 1000W/m^2 of broadband EM every time you go outside; the sun shines WAY outside the visible spectrum, you know. Have you ever ridden in an electric or hybrid electric vehicle? Have you been on a train or ship? Have you walked near a power transformer or driven past a substation? These all produce field effect many many orders of magnitude stronger than we are discussing here.
You are pulling out every logical fallacy in the book in your approach to this question. EM exposure is rigorously studied and safety standards have existed almost as long as we have known about electromagnetism! About the only time that a normal person even comes close to needing to worry about them is when getting an MRI or climbing a radio tower.
Johnny Mnemonic was a work of fiction, not a documentary.
This post brings back memories about the Johnny Mnemonic "interactive action movie" game, back in the 90s!
named after the virtual dolphin from the movie Johnny Mnemonic
The dolphin was named Jones not Flipper. And Jones was also a part of the short story that predated the film adaptation by several years. Check out "Burning Chrome," William Gibson's collection of short stories, for this and others. Well worth the read.
Related to that, Gibson has gotten one notorious adaptation of a short story to screen: Johnny Mnemonic. It's based on a short set vaguely "near" Neuromancer in setting/timeline. That movie is still a fun goofy pleasure and is truly aesthetics in service of Cool. I think it captures some of the aesthetics people love in the trilogy that starts with Neuromancer if you prefer the visual to the prose.
I also kind of think the Cyberpunk 2077 videogame adaptation is probably the closest to capturing the whole trilogy we might find in any adaptation, even with the indirection through the TTRPG which was heavily "inspired by" the trilogy and not directly an adaptation itself.
> Snow Crash is satire of more "serious" cyberpunk
Agree 100%. If anyone has trouble seeing that <i>Snow Crash</i> is satire, I recommend reading <i>Headcrash</i>, by Bruce Bethke, then going back to <i>Snow Crash</i>. If <i>Snow Crash</i> is the original <i>Robocop<i> (a satire that was deadpan enough that many people missed the satire entirely), then <i>Headcrash</i> is Paul Verhoeven's <i>Starship Troopers</i> (completely over-the-top).
> like Gibson.
It's easy to assume Gibson's work is serious, but I think anyone that does is subconsciously glossing over a lot of little details that - in sum - make it pretty clear that Gibson is also a satirist, just extraordinarily deadpan and casual about it.
Almost everyone gets a gritty <i>Blade Runner</i> image in their mind when reading his Sprawl stories, but consider that a key plot element is a space station built by weed-smoking Rastafarians. i.e. they are "so high they're in orbit", and that there are offhand references to an "Aryan reggae band". The military veteran - abandoned by an uncaring government - that happens to be a dolphin.
Then consider that the film and TV projects directly involving Gibson have typically featured plenty of comedic elements, and most have a bright, colourful look. <i>Johnny Mnemonic</i> (the film). The "First Person Shooter" and "Kill Switch" episodes of <i>The X-Files</i>.
The best part of Johnny Mnemonic (film) is what it is based on Johnny Mnemonic (short story) which is just 41kB or ~10 A4 pages at 12pt. Not so much to fill 96 minutes of the runtime.
I found it hilarious how, in the movie Johnny Mnemonic, set in 2021, he had to use a brain implant to smuggle 320 GiB of data -- a feat which, in actual 2021, could be done by swallowing an SD card in a toy balloon.
I mean, you're free to make up your own definition, but it won't be shared by the vast majority of other people.
From the Wikipedia article: [1]
> Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a dystopian futuristic setting that tends to focus on a "combination of lowlife and high tech" featuring futuristic technological and scientific achievements, such as artificial intelligence and cyberware, juxtaposed with societal collapse, dystopia or decay.
> The settings are usually post-industrial dystopias but tend to feature cultural ferment and the use of technology in ways never anticipated by its original inventors ("the street finds its own uses for things").
> Much of the genre's atmosphere echoes film noir
All of this comes from the foundational literary and cinematic works that defined the cyberpunk genre, namely (in rough chronological order): Blade Runner, Neuromancer, Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, Akira, Snow Crash, Johnny Mnemonic, and The Matrix.
The visual aesthetic representation of the cyberpunk genre is firmly rooted in a vocabulary involving dense cityscapes, night, neon lights, and rain (echoing the film noir vocabulary), often set in slums of East Asian metropolises or US Chinatowns.
Deciding that the common elements of all these works isn't what "cyberpunk" is is simply creating your own, personal, idiosyncratic definition.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk
I just got through watching Johnny Mnemonic with my wife (she likes Keanu Reeves movies as far back as "A Walk in the Clouds").
It plays much better today, as retro-futuristic nostalgia, than it did during its run in theaters in 1995.
It triggered a discussion my wife about William Gibson and how his visions play out a lot better on the page than on the screen.
Then she mentioned, without any input from me, that it seems like all the current Metaverse hype comes from people who must have watched and read all this stuff in the 90's and wanted it to be real, but never figured out how to actually make it work.
Which is weird because a spiritual predecessor (and another Keanu Reeves film), Johnny Mnemonic, uses a similar plot point where the brain is used as a data transfer medium.
So what?
It's a made up number that's supposed to sound fancy. It is for people who don't know much about computers. It's probably just there because people have heard the prefix 'tera', but wouldn't know what 'exa' or any other prefix means.
It doesn't mean anything. Documentation made by people having more pages than a CPU which was also made by people is interesting because these are real things made for specific purposes, not a number pulled out of thin air for fiction.
There is nothing 'mind blowing' about an uninformed person just being wrong. Is it 'mind blowing' that the original terminator was supposed to run on a 6502?
In Johnny Mnemonic 320 GB was supposed to be a lot of data in 2021 when it costs the same as lunch for two people.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113481/plotsummary/
Counterpoint, there's always been a desire to have a virtual environment as first shown in 80's sci-fi films like Hackers, Johnny Mnemonic, etc; immerse yourself in a system, have it become like a natural extension of yourself.
There was someone on here some time ago who showed and talked about his setup, he had been doing his job as a software developer reclined in VR for years at that point.
Here's the thing though: smartphones didn't have "a" killer app per sè I don't think, but they became part of everyone's daily lives in a really short timeframe. PCs and laptops didn't have "a" killer app, but pretty much everyone here has it as their day job.
I don't think it's about whether it has a killer app or not, I think it's whether it can become normalized and mainstream, and be listed alongside the TV, PC, smartphone, the car, etc; something everyone will have in one way or another.
That said, I'm cynical myself; modern-day VR and AR has been tried for a decade now or thereabouts; Google wasted billions on Google Glass, Facebook bet their whole company on the metaverse / AR / VR and has had to backtrack, Magic Leap was a mystery company that raised billions and failed to deliver, Oculus and Vive have their place now as a somewhat niche and pricey gaming implement - popular as arcade / events (I went to one for a birthday party this weekend) and middle class households that have the money and space for it.
So there's a market, mostly in gaming, but it's not become as mainstream yet as e.g. the smartphone. I don't personally believe it will, but if anyone can take an existing concept, iterate on it and make it mainstream, it's Apple.
I'm not saying Johnny Mnemonic is bad, just that it dates itself to the 90's so obviously these days. Same with Virtuosity, which I think is a very underrated movie.
In particular I really liked Henry Rollins' performance. It was the one thing they got just right.
Johnny Mnemonic isn't intended to be goofy and light-hearted, it's just a bad film. I really dig it for the Gibson vibe regardless.
The closest we will ever come to an authentic Neuromancer adaptation is the movie Johnny Mnemonic.
I think the only way to do Neuromancer justice is to recapture the camp yet earnest energy of the Johnny Mnemonic movie. Unfortunately I don't have high hopes.
A few months ago they came out with a black and white recut of Johnny Mnemonic. Around that time I was rewatching it and what hit me like a brick was this is what the movie's depiction (released in 1995) of what Beijing in 2021 would look like: https://i.imgur.com/WZY6hjf.png
Very cool, I was watching Johnny Mnemonic recently and lamenting that Gibson's stories have never really been given a fair chance on film/tv. Mnemonic is worth a rewatch and IMHO has actually improved with age now that you can look back at some of the effects and such as retro 90s nostalgia. I'm looking forward to see what Apple does for Neuromancer.
> My idea is to place a keyboard in a pair of gloves
Like in the film: Johnny Mnemonic?
Honestly? I hope not. If a true visionary were to direct it, Stanley Kubrick or Ridley Scott in their prime, or Denis Villeneuve, who seems to be able to do impossible things — maybe. Otherwise I’d expect it to be as dull and forgettable as most movies made from PKD sources — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adaptations_of_works_by_Philip_K._Dick
I saw William Gibson read at Powell’s years ago, maybe around the Virtual Light era. Someone asked him about Johnny Mnemonic, about why Molly Millions wasn’t in it. He said something like, “I thought they were going to fuck up the movie, and if I’d let them write Molly into it then the studio would own her and I’d never be able to have her in a better movie.”
So I’d hope that Gibson is involved in this, and has higher expectations or involvement than before.
I remember playing first the C64 Neuromancer game, which seemed great at the time and then moving on to the novel. I was always surprised they made a game but then never made a movie, especially when Johnny Mnemonic came out.
I was shocked to read this comment because I interpreted your original comment as meaning a Philip K Dick novel would be optimistic compared to the cyberpunk dystopia in which we find ourselves now. lol
Anyway it's pretty fair to confuse the two I think, there can't be any way Johnny Mnemonic wasn't influenced by Blade Runner (I'm guessing it's true of both the movies and of the books). Very similar themes and protagonists at a certain level of abstraction.
Small nit but I was confused, I think Johnny Mnemonic is Gibbson? And I had to look up NAS, I think that part of the movie not the book. I think we have another couple decades before androids and mood organs of Phillip K dick at least but I could be wrong. But parts of Gibbsonian cyberpunk is already here!
Now we just need a way to encrypt our brain waves lol. I’m reminded of the book by Haruki Murakami: Hard boiled wonderland and the end of the world and the Keanu Reeves film, Johnny Mnemonic
Also discriminates against folks that would like a semblance of privacy as well. Been trying to get rid of my smartphone while every service and product around is trying to make it the only option.
Related, last night I started watching this B-movie on Netflix, called "Johnny Mnemonic." (Had never seen it despite being a Bill and Ted fan.) From the 90s but set in 2021. In it there is a criminal underbelly consisting of folks who reject oppressive technology called the "Lo-Teks" ... and I thought wait a minute, that's me! That's my gang. Even get to hang out with Ice-T. :-D
Pretty sure there's an old movie with Keanu Reeves using some sort of power glove to "browse the net", cyberpunk style.
Edit: Oh yeah it was Johnny Mnemonic https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0113481/
I agree in general, but there is one exception and that exception applies here: film noir. Johnny Mnemonic and cyberpunk in general derive a lot of its inspiration from film noir and film noir in color just isn't the same.
Another attempt.
Prompt:
> A photo in the style of a still from the 1995 science fiction movie Johnny Mnemonic, showing a man sitting in front of a Transputer.
Results:
* https://i.imgur.com/5ESVag2.png
* https://i.imgur.com/8APGO8b.png
* https://i.imgur.com/n38em4Q.png
* https://i.imgur.com/rM4bDit.png
I like these more. Still not sure the output is in any way influenced by the word "transputer" though, as these look like pretty regular computers.
Guess I am left with no choice but to read the PDF itself. And hope that it's worth it :p
It's a reference to the story that inspired the movie.
> The prototype of our character is the cyborg dolphin Jones from the story "Johnny Mnemonic" by William Gibson.
Johnny Mnemonic from the Burning Chrome short story collection by Gibson. A staple of the cyberpunk bookshelf from the late 80s, and yes a very cheesy Keanu film...
Probably because it's intended for use as a "data courier" like Johnny Mnemonic himself, hence the "MNEMONIC" on the wings. And the movie is from 1995; the story is from 1981.
I find it interesting how we're coming up on actual 2025, and if he wanted to smuggle 320 GiB of information with his body, Johnny needn't risk his life or his childhood memories; he could simply swallow a condom with an SD card in it. I still want a SinoLogic 16 with a GPL stealth module, Sogo-7 data gloves, a Burdine intelligent translator and Thomson eyephones, though.
The end of the "Drone courier" video includes a trailer for Johnny Mnemonic, a cyberpunk film from 1981. Seems interesting.
And didn't Gibson write the screenplay for the film adaptation of Johnny Mnemonic where they coined the term iPhone in that one random scene for two seconds? Or did I imagine that?
Anyway I guess thats like the opposite of cyberpunk... or is it? :shrug-emoji:
All these links and no 'Johnny Mnemonic' reference. Takes place in 2021.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Mnemonic_(film)
Keanu Reeves was also in Johnny Mnemonic which had a similar concept.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Mnemonic_(film)
William Gibson's "Burning Chrome".
(Provided the rough skeleton for the movie "Johnny Mnemonic".) Appears in a collection of Gibson stories also titled Burning Chrome.
At least you have the Johnny Mnemonic movie which I have watched and enjoyed several times since I had it on a VHS tape I bought. BTW, 30 seconds ago, I re-purchased it in digital form from the Google Play Store.
Want to echo this. I think we are remembering our remembering. There is bonafide scientific research on this. There was a Microsoft Research Cambridge project called SenseCam .. I think the first paper was helping a woman with memory loss. She was really remembering her memory of recalling a moment.
When I encountered that research, I reflected on my own childhood memories and concluded that this DRAM mechanism is what is going on for me.
On an alternate note, I'm in my 40s now and I hardly remember anything. I have two little kids and am often shocked when I see pictures from a year or two ago (can't remember when they were that young). A few other tech friends have suggested things are similar with them. I am constantly having to learn new stuff in my line of work (AI) ... stuff from 2017 is often referred to as "old". I'm a bit worried my memory capacity is finite and starting to overwrite on itself (sort of like a fake SD card that overwrites content or the Johnny Mnemonic movie)
See also Toronto's ghost station: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_station#Lower_Bay
Movie credits include Johnny Mnemonic.
There was a truly terrible Keanu Reaves movie released in the mid 90's, Johnny Mnemonic (which I just learned was based on a William Gibson book of the same name).
I haven't watched the movie in 25 years, but from memory the premise is that corporations use human brains as organic/wetware hard drives to transfer information because hardware-only storage has largely maxed out or would be too cumbersome for information smuggling.
In the movie, the base storage capacity of the human brain is said to be 80gb, though the protagonist is able to increase his storage capacity to 320gb by using a cybernetic implant and agreeing to dump a bunch of his childhood memories to make extra room.
This seemed like a ludicrous amount of data to 10 year old me. Our recently purchased top of the line 486 had a 400MB hard drive, so the amount of data stored in Keanu's head was nearly 3 orders of magnitude more.
Exponential growth is a hell of thing.
I'm a HUGE fan of Gibson's books, but let's be honest: he's 72 years old, and might not be the best judge of modern video games. He was also involved in (and wrote the screenplay for) the Johnny Mnemonic movie, which was one of the blandest attempts at mainstreaming cyberpunk ever.
The Japanese stereotypes and Haitian gangs are lifted straight off the pages of Neuromancer and Count Zero. I dig the retrofuturist 80s vibe, but then I love retrofuturism in general so that's not surprising.
In the end, CP2077 is a AAA video game. It has to appeal to the general population, so yeah, it's probably not going to be the most experimental take on the genre. As mainstream cyberpunk attempts go, can we at least agree it's heads-and-shoulders better than Netflix's Altered Carbon? :)
I'm an optimist so shoot me. I believe that AR combined with AI enhancement is the future for human kind. We will become cyborgs, but not in the dystopian usually described in movies/books, but the one usually described in Asimov novels (like Johnny Mnemonic though I know is not Asimov's novel, but no title comes to mind). We will be 100% in control of all devices, so there will still be both evil and good in humanity.
Good luck using peripherals that requires physical access to them. The day web browsers will have full physical access (well, they technically do but you guys understand what I am saying, right?) is the day hackers will transform internet into that dystopian world from the old movie with Keanu Reevs - Johnny Mnemonic (the short novel is even better btw).
Thank you for this, I did not know about Syd Mead, but just flipping through the images on that page it's clear how influential he was. Wikipedia lists pretty much exactly the associations I made:
> Mead worked with major studios on the feature films: Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner, Tron, 2010, Short Circuit, Aliens, The Spirit of '76, Timecop, Johnny Mnemonic, Mission: Impossible III, Elysium, Tomorrowland and Blade Runner 2049. George Lucas created the AT-AT for his Star Wars saga based on art by Mead.
This is in no way to diminish his work, but the impression I got (and that I'm trying to confirm/debunk, given the wikipedia article doesn't really address this) is that his art really transposes the society of its time into the future. That is, he almost exclusively addresses the technological advancement, while keeping the societal structures largely intact. For example, that's why the retrofitted houses give the impression of still being inhabited largely by working class people, while the ski resort and leisure time imagery with the sports cars still seems to be a luxury only few can afford even in the future. I don't see signs of "fully automated luxury space communism" there.
This may be me projecting though, hence the question if this is correct. And again, this is not to take away from his work. They are stunning. :)
I think most people agree that cyberpunk is pretty cool, right? Even if you just see the movies, blade runner, ghost in a shell, johnny mnemonic, etc.
There's a Johnny Mnemonic movie, but unfortunately it's not very good.
Certainly is! :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Mnemonic_(film)
http://www.subzin.com/quotes/M1282877de/Johnny+Mnemonic/Synaptic+seepage+can+kill+you+in+2+or+3+days.
Or plan on “borrowing” the plans and software for the robots. The story of Robin Hood never goes out of style.
I propose Keanu Reeves plays the protagonist in the film adaption, a spiritual successor of Johnny Mnemonic.
While on the (off-) topic of magneto-optical drives, do you remember how every cyberpunk film of the 1990s seemed to feature (MO) MiniDiscs as ‘future’ storage? I remember them appearing in some form or another in Strange Days, Johnny Mnemonic, and The Matrix (amongst others). Lawnmower Man featured CD drives in external caddies, a type of drive system that virtually disappeared with the advent of ‘2x” CD-ROM drives starting sometime in 1992 or 1993.
My first USB ‘thumbrive’ was a 16MB IBM-branded unit I received as an amazing gift in December 2001, when the world was still in shock over the 9/11 attacks.
God, the memories...
Well I'm glad somebody does! Regular people are losing big time here--facial recognition tech has a huge false positive rate, and probably a ridiculous false negative, rate, too. It's junk, but they keep pushing and pushing for it like it is some miracle tech.
I always thought the weird face makeup in those dystopian sci-fi films like Johnny Mnemonic were just there to make the street hacker type characters look edgy, but in fact, even back in the '70s and '80s, the authors were on to something.
Gibson's prose has a short shelf life. That's why he doesn't write future-set stories anymore.
In the film of Johnny Mnemonic, the screenplay of which was penned by Gibson himself, Johnny must act as a courier for 320 GB by using a brain implant -- in 2025. It's 2018 in the real world, and data smugglers today would probably get farther by swallowing toy balloons with two or three microSD cards in them than by going the whole invasive wipe-your-childhood-memories brain implant route (if such a route were available).
I find his discourse on fax machines interesting. I just rewatched Johnny Mnemonic, and a fax machine plays a significant plot role in that film. At the end, J-Bone says "Get your VCRs ready". This despite the writing being quite on the wall for both fax machines and VCRs even in 1995.
Cyberpunk is a bit misnamed, I think, because as expressed by Gibson and his copycats, it's distinctly hipsterish. There's a fondness for the old, a desire to flash-freeze the zeitgeist (usually of the Beat era) so that it could live, in some sense, forever. In Max Headroom, every time we see a computer it has an old manual typewriter (much like the one Gibson used to write Neuromancer on, because to him computers were and still somewhat are alien invaders) for a keyboard.
Strangely, Johnny Mnemonic goes overboard with the technology in other ways: in 2015, let alone 2025, Johnny could have fenced 320 GiB of data at considerably less personal risk by swallowing a toy balloon with Micro SD cards in it.
I agree with a lot of this. He's said himself that when he got the contract for a novel, he didn't know how to write one, and was kind of panicked about being boring. That's why the first 60 pages or so of the book (through the Sense/Net strike to get the Dixie Flatline's cartridge) is like a nonstop adrenaline rush. It's so exciting! I had no idea science fiction could be like that, the first time I read it.
I strongly agree that his best work was in Burning Chrome. Unfortunately, the only film adaptations of his work we have are two stories from that collection, and they were both awful in different ways. Johnny Mnemonic misses all but the barest outlines of the story - where's Molly? I can't believe they gave up the fight on the "Killing Floor" with Molly vs the vatgrown ninja in favor of blowing up a bridge. Sigh. New Rose Hotel, on the other hand, hewed very close to the original story - which was fine, except the story was only six pages long.
As an aside, I have a band called The Gernsback Continuum, after the short story.
After reading Johnny Mnemonic I saw the movie and liked it so much that I bought it on DVD. We all have different tastes. I liked the mood of the movie, thought it worthy of being a cult classic.
I'd rate the second book (broken angels) as one of my favourite sci-fi books (which might include tiger,Tiger/the stars my destination, neuromancer, fire upon the deep, holy Fire... There are many great ones).
I started with that one though, and then read the other two.
I'd say overall as a triology, it rates alongside neuromancer /the sprawl triology. A little more pulp - but a similar serious take on technological evolution.
[ed: the netflix series is to ac, a little like the Johnny Mnemonic film is to the short story. Although the series is a bit closer to the books]
> I'm not aware of any motion picture adaptations of Stephenson's or Gibson's works.
Well, for what it's worth, there is Johnny Mnemonic, which wasn't very well received although I personally liked it. Another short story set in the Sprawl, New Rose Hotel, was also adapted to a film (I haven't seen it), and many other works, including Neuromancer, have been in various stages of development for a while. More details at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gibson#Film_adaptations,_screenplays,_and_appearances
The lack of vehicles for SF delivery have at times impeded literary acceptance and broader adoption -- take H.P. Lovecraft for instance, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft#Literary
Format adaptations have catapulted some great SF into the pop culture stardom:
The War of the Worlds was published in 1898, and though looked upon favorably, it is rarely mentioned today without also mentioning the 1938 radio broadcast.
The Wizard of Oz (Baum 1900) is more famous for its 1939 film.
In more modern times, Johnny Mnemonic (1995 film from "Burning Chrome", Gibson 1986), Snowpiercer (2013 film from "Le Transperceneige", Lob and Rochette 1982), and The Martian (2015 film from "The Martian", Weir 2011) have all increased SF visibility through film adaptations.
Without format shift, would general SF readers have pursued these works independent from the film? Probably. Would these works have entered pop culture and have been sought by the everyman, even the ones who don't routinely buy books or enjoy reading? Less likely.
> The problem with hollywood movie plots is people have been able to remove the optical drive or floppy drive from a laptop for decades, insert a baggie of weed or whatever criminal activity.
Indeed. And a decade or more before the movie's purported date of 2025, we realized that Johnny Mnemonic would be better served smuggling data by swallowing a toy balloon with micro SD cards in it. Today he could get away with just three or four cards.
As he says in the talk this truck is for 100 Pb, you'd need 10 of them for the aforementioned Exabyte (Eb); which I imagine would nicely equate to a train.
If this data is valuable though wouldn't it need to be securely transported; Mad Max: Fury Road springs to mind...
Increasingly the film Johnny Mnemonic is becoming more and more preposterous; it was 320 Gb in the film. I think the book was 320Mb.
It made me think of the William Gibson short story "Johnny Mnemonic" (the original story, not the almost-unrecognizable movie version).
Johnny Mnemonic anyone? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Mnemonic_(film)
A great book. Unfortunately after Johnny Mnemonic , and the matrix(2+3) which were total garbage, I'm not sure I would want a movie based on that book.
It however influenced so much good stuff,like Ghost in the shell which is basically the same plot,Deus ex and others.
I enjoyed the audio-book read by Gibson itself,it was excellent.
Hackers. (watch it as a movie, not as a technical reference)
Runners up : Johnny Mnemonic, Ghost in the Shell, Armitage
Interesting, so we're finally getting virtual reality helmets? I've been waiting since the early 1990s. They seemed to be right around the corner and were featured in several films like Lawnmower Man (1992), that Aerosmith video (Amazing, 1993), Disclosure (1994), Virtuosity (1995), Johnny Mnemonic (1995), Hackers (1995).
I suppose it makes sense, every technology seems to take about 20 years to reach the consumer market. I wonder if it has anything to do with patents lasting for 20 years.
I think in this way it was a perfect successor to the original. Beautiful impressive visuals (each for their time, remember) with a 'cyberpunk-lite' plot to provide a reason for those visuals.
As far as cyberpunk in media that dare actually include cyberspace aspects (so for example, not Blade Runner), I think it stacks up pretty well. The Matrix 'cheats' by explicitly declaring that their cyberspace was built to seem real, and Johnny Mnemonic, rather bluntly, falls on it's face when trying to pull it off (I do love that movie though).
The New Yorker piece (written by Aleksandar Hemon) on the Wachowskis was really good: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/09/10/120910fa_fact_hemon
Some parts I found interesting:
"According to Mattis, the Wachowskis were “the hot flavor of the month” when he sent the “Matrix” screenplay out, in 1994. “But then everyone read the script and passed. Nobody got it,” he said. “To this day, I think Warner Bros. bought it half out of the relationship with them and half because they thought something was there.”
The power of connections! If Warner Bros haven't bought their Assassins script The Matrix might not have been made.
Also:
"“The problem with market-driven art-making is that movies are green-lit based on past movies,” Lana told me. “So, as nature abhors a vacuum, the system abhors originality. Originality cannot be economically modelled.” The template for “The Matrix,” the Wachowskis recalled, had been “Johnny Mnemonic,” a 1995 Keanu Reeves flop.
Let's hope it is as good as Johnny Mnemonic
no, wait, that movie really sucked
Call me a lunatic, but I really enjoyed Johnny Mnemonic (the international version with the extra scenes from the extended Japanese version spliced in and sub'd). It was by no means a flawless movie (Keanu Reeves' acting was about as bad as bad Keanu Reeves acting can get, and they royally fucked up Molly Millions' character (apparently because they didn't have rights to use the actual Molly Millions character due to a Neuromancer movie attempt or somethig)), but all in all it really felt Gibson.
Stylistically, I think it was dead on.
EDIT: goes over the differences between the international version and the Japanese version: http://www.movie-censorship.com/report.php?ID=1523&In=Quer basically, they removed nearly every supporting scene for the main Japanese character, and the explanation of the ending.
After Johnny Mnemonic, I'm kinda shocked that he'd allow this. Granted film effects have come a long way, but it'll take a hell of a screen writer and director to bring that to the screen.
Edit: Guess the point is, even if it is really good, I'm not sure it could live up to expectations.
This is actually the plot of Johnny Mnemonic. I can't believe anything about that movie's plot turned out to be realistic.
It might be somewhere past vaporware. There is a product demo video for 2009 where typing is demonstrated. However, even if it does work, it may not work well enough (yet) for real-world uses. Future prototype iterations may well improve dramatically.
Inventor Gunilla Alsiö's elevator pitch at Plugg '09 (one of 20 invited startups out of 143 applicants at this Europe entrepreneur event).
"The movies [Minority Report, Johnny Mnemonic] are fiction but Senseboard is real. We will let you try this yourself during lunchtime. Our business model based on licensing, with the combination of licensing fees and senseboard chips. We are focusing on the mobile gaming market."
http://vimeo.com/3603806 (Starts @8:55, note, some of the other elevator pitches are fascinating to watch - check out Myngle's @2:45)
In the demo video, the rate of typing (painfully slow!) shown seems to indicate that the technology may not be fast and/or robust enough for coding or even email-composition typing needs.
"A first 0-series of the Senseboard(R) Gesture Recognition Technology has been introduced and can be tested at MWC. A demo video is available for download on at: http://www.senseboard.com/video_0109/video.php "
@1:17 - demo of using senseboard for Google earth navigation
@2:06 - virtual keyboard demo (note: continuity issues - video quality is low, set is different from Google nav demo - leading me to suspect it might not be demo'able live - if it was, why wouldn't they film it the same day/setting)
The video is 78mb and it has a weird, smooth jazz soundtrack. Don't want to jump their bandwidth usage but they don't stream it. Maybe someone can share/host it.
still a few more (some are in the works)
* Stargate
* "startup.com" - about the formation of 'govworks.com' i wonder what these guys think about Obama.
* Takedown - 'Kevin Mitnick's story'
* Serenity
* Star Trek: the Voyage Home
* The Last Starfighter
* Johnny Mnemonic
* Short Circuit 1 & 2
* Crest of the Stars (anime)
* Fahrenheit 451
* Equilibrium
* Batman (begins, dark night, the tim burten one)
* Edward Scissor Hands
* Space Balls
* Avalon ( http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/movie/decade/2000-current/avalon/#comments)
* LAIN: The Serial Experiments (anime)
* Cherry 2000
* Dune
* Ender's Shadow (in the works)
* Ender's Game (in the works)
* Diamond Age (in the works for sci-fi, 'a young girls illustrated primer')
* The Arrival
* The Terminator 1,2,3
* The Sarah Conner Chronicles
* D.A.R.Y.L
* Flight of the Navigator
* Explorers
* AI
* Batteries Not Included
* Blade Runner
* IRobot
* Appleseed (anime)
* Bubble Gum Crisis (anime)
* Ergo Proxy (anime)
* Virtuosity
* Metropolis (all of them are good)
* The Last Exile (anime)
* Cherry 2000
* Robocop (this so hold up)
* Primmer
* Probe ( the TV series, it took me 3 months to find the copies of this Issac Asimov based TV series on ABC ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probe_(TV_series)
* Infest Wisely
* Logan's Run
* Planet of the Apes
* Star Trek: First Contact
* CQ ( if you get it, you'll get why this is a hacker movie , 'la resistance')
* Amelie
* 2046
* Trigun (anime)
* Escaflone (anime)
* Tank Girl
* Twelve Monkeys
* THX 1138
* Bicentennial Man
* The Philadelphia Experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philadelphia_Experiment_(film)
* Seaquest ( some episodes )
* Strange Days ( new yeas hacker style )
* Freejack
I'd like to erase all memory of the movie Johnny Mnemonic... and maybe Paycheck too.