May 10 2021 Re-Release on Digital Platforms > Future Flash-Back to Matrix Prequel "Johnny Mnemonic"

Sci-Fi Cyber Punk

In the 2021 imagined here, people are still evidently without mobile phones (hotels are “paging” people in the lobby, as they might have done in 1921) and faxes are still a thing. But what is notable is how prescient it is.

(Audacious … Johnny Mnemonic. Photograph: Vertigo Releasing)

Data is the most important thing in the world, whose information portals are governed by the all-important “internet”, still a relatively unfamiliar word in 1995. The world is convulsed by a terrible pandemic, people are wearing masks, and big pharma rules.

 

Johnny takes one last job before planning to retire and have the long-promised remedial surgery that will reimplant his lost personal memories. He is hired by people he assumes are his usual corporate clientele, but who turn out to be representatives of the street-warrior punks who are opposed to big business; they have stolen top-secret information and placed it in Johnny’s head. But the size and amount of the information is – dangerously – far too large, and Johnny becomes sicker and more desperate, especially when he realises what this information actually is. The mega-rich owners decide that the only clean way to retrieve their data property is to cut Johnny’s head off. . ."

Johnny Mnemonic review – Keanu test-drives early Matrix prototype

Peter Bradshaw

the Guardian |

Keanu Reeves is in impeccably robotic form as a data courier on the run in this 1995 adaptation of William Gibson’s cyberpunk story set in 2021

More

Keanu Reeves is in impeccably robotic form as a data courier on the run in this 1995 adaptation of William Gibson’s cyberpunk story set in 2021