johnny Mnemonic

This film is one of the first ones to strongly introduce cyber-punk. This cyber-punk movement was created by William Gibson who wrote the original story as well as the screenplay for the film.

The story centers around Johnny Pneumonic who has the ability to store large amounts of memory is his brain. This memory is used to store sensitive information, for which Johnny acts as a human currier. In order to gain the amount of memory that he can use for this storage, Johnny had to give up his childhood memories. This makes one wonder about whether he had something tragic to give up, or whether he just really needed the job. In any case, the removal of his childhood memories has greatly affected the way that Johnny views the world. He is very selfish, as made obvious in the "Room Service" scene. He has become so selfish because he cannot remember a time when any truly cared about him, such as his childhood.

This film is interesting got view because it started out with such promise, in the form of the genius writer William Gibson, but fell short because of a bad director who was actually used to doing feature film’s William Gibson was a very talented writer who actually coined the term "Cyberspace”


Gibson was able to put the intricate digital world into his own form of poetry. Also his concept of having Johnny be able to act within the cyber world was very unique.

Where the film went wrong is the director, Robert Longo. He was known for his visual arts, not his films. Because of this a majority of the acting is horrible. It seams Longo was more concerned with the surroundings that the actors inhabited that their acting itself. Because of this a lot of the scene constructions are very very good, but the acting is quite the opposite. An example of the beautiful staging is the chase scene that looks like Kabuki Theater. All of the movements are very graceful.