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Johnny Mnemonic
Film poster for Johnny Mnemonic
Directed by	Robert Longo
Produced by	Staffan Ahrenberg, Don Carmody, Victoria Hamburg, Robert Lantos
Written by	William Gibson
Starring	Keanu Reeves, Dina Meyer, Henry Rollins, Jamie Elman, Gene Mack, Celina Wu, Beat Takeshi, Ice-T Dolph Lundgren Udo Kier
Cinematography	François Protat
Editing by	Ronald Sanders
Distributed by	Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Release date(s)	May 26, 1995
Running time	Japan - 107 min (video version) USA - 96 min
Country	Canada  United States
Language	Japanese & English
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

Johnny Mnemonic is a 1995 cyberpunk movie, loosely based on a short story of the same name by William Gibson, in which Keanu Reeves plays the title character, a man with a cybernetic implant in his brain designed to store information. It portrays Gibson's standard dystopian view of the future with the world dominated by large corporations and with strong East Asian influences.

The film was directed by Robert Longo on location in Canada, with Toronto and Montreal filling in for Newark, New Jersey and Beijing. A number of local monuments feature prominently, such as Toronto's Union Station and Montréal's Jacques Cartier Bridge.

The film is notable for the presence of Takeshi Kitano, whose role in the Japanese version of the film was greatly expanded.^[1]

Johnny is a data trafficker who has an implant that allows him to securely store data that is too sensitive for regular computer networks. His brain can carry nearly 80 gigabytes worth of data, or 160 gigabytes if he uses a doubler. Johnny uses this implant to act as a courier between contracting parties. On one delivery run, he accepts a package that not only exceeds the implant's safety limits (and will thus kill him if the data isn't removed in time), but also proves to contain information far more important and valuable than he had ever imagined. He has to get the data removed, and avoid being killed by assassins sent after him by the company who owns the data.

The story in the movie significantly deviates from the short story in parts, most notably turning Johnny, not girlfriend Molly, into the main action character. In fact, the girlfriend character was transformed in the movie from Molly into "Jane", as the film rights to Molly were owned by a company not affiliated with the producers of this film.^{[citation needed]}

Neural Attenuation Syndrome (NAS) is a fictional disease in the film, which is not present in the short story. NAS, also called "the black shakes", is caused by an overexposure to information, and is presented as a raging epidemic affecting the world in the future. The plot of the film revolves around the one pharmaceutical corporation that has found a cure but chooses to hold it back from the public in favor of a more lucrative treatment program.

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On its release, the movie was scorned by film critics, who mocked what they saw as mediocre acting, hardly-believable characters (including a drug-addicted dolphin and a hitman who patterns himself after Jesus Christ), and lack of substance/coherence. At one point in the film, Johnny loses his temper and launches into an infamously over-the-top, selfish tirade ("I want room service!") that earns the character as much derision as sympathy.

Basically what happened was it was taken away and re-cut by the American distributor in the last month of its prerelease life, and it went from being a very funny, very alternative piece of work to being something that had been very unsuccessfully chopped and cut into something more mainstream.

—William Gibson, in interview with The Peak magazine, 19th October, 1998.^[2]

Despite this negative critical reaction, the film was nevertheless a modest success and could be considered influential on a number of subsequent films.^{[citation needed]} Because it is considered to be one of the better portrayals of the cyberpunk genre, it is considered a cult classic by some fans ^[3].

• Johnny Mnemonic The Screenplay and the Story (Ace Books)(1995)
• Live Action Video Game PC CD-Rom (Sony Interactive)(1995)

• Johnny Mnemonic at the Internet Movie Database
• Johnny Mnemonic at Rotten Tomatoes