The data smuggler also liked to do community theater on the side, as he felt he could become an actor. Sadly, he was wrong.
Johnny Mnemonic (1995) has some interesting elements to it, but it ultimately fails because there’s no real hook from which the audience might learn[1]. Consider the categories of characters with which we’re presented: a data smuggler who uses a brain implant, which has displaced his childhood memories, in order to make room for the huge data downloads with which he’s entrusted; the Yakuza, a collection of Japanese-based international organized crime syndicates (these are reality-based); a senior executive of PharmaKom, a pharmaceutical company whose data is being stolen, who has personally been devastated by the death of his only child by the disease his company may have found a cure for; the mainframe-based ghost of the founder of PharmaKom; the Lo-Teks, an outlaw group bound together by the belief that this world’s intensive information society is damaging its members; a man turning himself into a cyborg who raises the funds by hiring himself out for assassinations, which he performs as a Christian-based ritual death; a bodyguard who maintains her edge through the use of debilitating drugs while fighting off a terminal disease; and a dolphin.
This is set in the future, a future where that new, terminal illness has emerged, called Nerve Attenuation Syndrome (NAS), a disease characterized by the “black shakes”. The plot is that a group of Lo-Teks has stolen unknown data from PharmaKom, and hired the data smuggler to move it securely from their location to the headquarters of the Lo-Teks. The data smuggler’s implant doesn’t actually have enough capacity for the download, and the extra is stored in his brain, thus endangering his sanity and life. He’s motivated to take the job because he wants his childhood memories back; he currently feels isolated from the world. This job will provide the funds to remove the implant.
The Yakuza show up just as the download finishes, massacring the scientists but missing out on the data smuggler. In the fray, the encryption key, consisting of three images, is torn in half and the smuggler emerges with only one of the images. While it seems the Yakuza were hired by the PharmaKom executive, they may later decide to take the data for themselves, but it’s not really clear. In any case, he hires the aspiring cyborg to finish the job, which is to acquire the data smuggler’s head. The implant is not enough, you see, because the data overflowed; the entire head is necessary.
And the smuggler is having none of that. He’s struggling to find a way to download and decrypt the data, and eventually he shows up at Lo-Tek headquarters, who appear to be little more than a streetgang that happens to hold a wrecked bridge in New Jersey. Along the way he acquires the services of the bodyguard, who rescues him from a group trying to take his head. The Lo-Teks have the services of a code-breaking US Navy dolphin, because that’s useful to have at this point in the plot, never mind how silly it may be, and in the midst of the mutual massacres of the Yakuza, the Lo-Teks, and the PharmaKom dudes, the data is decrypted and spread through public channels for all to see.
And what is the data? A how-to for curing NAS.
Oh, and that ghost has been torturing the PharmaKom exec with assertions that PharmaKom used his own child for testing the cure.
So, how about us little guys, the common citizen? Are there any in this story? In short, no. Most of these folks are so far beyond your typical audience’s experience that an instant connection is not possible. Nor does the movie, at least the one cut for the TV, provide much of a hook to any of these characters. That exec who lost his child to experimentation? We saw nothing, we’re just told that’s what happened. The data smuggler’s lost childhood, is it really that awful for him? We can’t tell. Maybe his parents beat him everyday, for all we know.
And NAS is supposedly widespread and kills most of the victims – so are there riots in the streets? Have the citizens all given up on whatever activity is causing the disease? Well, hell, we don’t know – and if some version of the movie does tell us, that’ll be the problem – they tell us.
Stories are about showing. How about an old-fashioned riot in the streets with some characters with which we can identify?
The special effects are a little goofy, the acting is OK, but the story feels like a first draft, and could have used two or three more, not to mention a few brainstorming sessions. In the end, the characters aren’t much more than dull cardboard cutouts. The ideas are OK, especially that of NAS, but the suggestion that PharmaKom sacrificed little kids, especially the exec’s own child, to find a cure for the disease seems both stale and, in its particulars, a bit unbelievable. A man building himself into a cyborg doesn’t seem unrealistic, given today’s body modification fetishists, but it just seems out of place in this story.
And a dolphin? Really? Why?
1Keeping in mind I’m analyzing in the context of the theory that stories provide keys to survival to the audiences, and the better they do so, the better a story they will be considered.
