I just finished rewatching Johnny Mnemonic for the first time.
I saw this in the theater on release which I’m guessing I saw pretty close to my 13th birthday. I don’t remember my assessment, so I must not have cared that much about it.
Rewatching it 31 years later: I had no idea it was a comedy. The acting, the line deliveries… just, holy shit. And then Ice-T, Henry Rollins, fucking He-Man, a dolphin? How’d I forget the dolphin? It’s easy to set aside the outdated vision of the future (to be fair, they always got the evil corporation part right), but what in the fever dream fuck happened here. It looks like it was a cool idea on paper then someone was like (hands) aliens (pyramid in background) and here came Keanu, classically seasoned as an actor from playing (checks resume) Dog Boy. Crazy that The Matrix got made after this.
Ha, Stabbing Westward and Helmet in the credits. Great. I was sampling Helmet again the other day.
Where did this dark, grungy PKD feel in movies about the future go? How sterile the future actually looked. Safe blues and beige for everyone! Here’s your perfect rectangle that connects to totally-not-skynet, not a cable to be found anywhere, and remember to trash it every 2-3 years because we must always be prescient and never allow space for analog dust. Was all the dusty grunge a reaction to the hair spray and day-glo of the decade previous? And now, that?
I see teenagers today wearing the ridiculous pants that my peers and I wore in high school (wet legs and all) and it begs some questions about hackysacks and mixtapes. I assume it’s just another fleeting fashion, but maybe they catch on faster than my fucking idiot peers did and prevent the next agreeably blue-based takeover of the entire internet in the name of convenience aka ease of manipulation.
Mmm the irony of how I was going to post this fully on bluesky until it hit 300 characters. But you know I was talking about Facebook and Twitter. And Amazon and Walmart and Temu and… I guess the good news is that not every restaurant is Taco Bell (Sysco maniacally laughs in the background).