Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Johnny Mnemonic

by Nathan Stout (of AccordingToWhim.com)

Most movies that have some success are generally accepted as the great work of a director. I have always thought this was a bad deal since the movie wouldn't have existed without the person who came up with and wrote the story. Jurassic Park was such a great Steven Spielberg movie... pshaw, that was a great concept by Michael Chrichton, Spielberg just directed it but he gets all the credit.

Johnny Mnemonic proves that a director IS important (which takes some of the air out of my argument about directors). This is a great story with such bad execution you can't help buy laugh at it. When the credits rolled I was shocked to see that the screenplay was written by William Gibson. If you have ever read his books you know that this turd couldn't have come from him...

I am going to say that Johnny Mnemonic ran afoul in a couple of departments. Firstly the director did a piss-poor job. The acting is bad... not just bad but... B A D. The actors themselves aren't bad actors in general (Keanu accepted) but you need a good director that gets the actors to give a good performance and this director did not do this. Robert Longo was a music video director and needless to say this was his first and last movie. He was like Russell Mulchay but with less talent.

I would also blame the producers and the fact that Gibson didn't seem to have anyone there to edit his screenplay. I thought the story was a little too convoluted which would probably play out fine in a book but not in an hour and a half movie. The characters of the Pharmacom AI ghost and the Pharmacom Executive could have been cut out as well as one of the highlights: Dolf Lundgren's Street Preacher.

The story itself is great and hadn't been done in this particular way before. Even with the unnecessary characters most people couldn't get pas the acting... sheesh.

With that said let's enjoy the scenes of the Street Preacher... Halt Sinners!

I love William Gibson's Neuromancer universe (also known as Cyberpunk or Netunner). I loved his books and the NetRunner CCG (based on that universe). As crappy as this movie can be there is still that Cyberpunk element here and that's why I can't just write off this movie and move on.

Since Hollywood is so into remakes they should remake this movie. I would say they should have made Neuromancer but I think that was probably their original thought but decided that story wouldn't do well on screen so they asked Gibson to write something 'more accessable' to the public.

As a side note in the end Johnny Mnemonic didn't do too bad overall. The movie cost was around 25 million and world wide the movie made 52 million.