Johnny Mnemonic

Johnny Mnemonic is horrendous. Just as bad as everyone said. I've enjoyed the few short stories of Gibson I've read, so either he was just completely out of his depth writing the screenplay, or, much more likely, hiring a music video director and having Keanu Reeves try to act was a horrible decision. Gibson is, of course, an extremely prescient writer, but his writing was better for the ideas rather than the writing style. Too bad the movie doesn't really get the style right. The cast is also full of people who do some terrible work, and only Takeshi Kitano has really been in a good movie, so I was rooting for him to win. Would have made me much happier. Dolph Lundgren, Dina Meyer, Ice-T, Tracy Tweed (younger sister of Shannon), Henry Rollins, and the great Udo Kier are all horrible. Well, actually my choice of great as an honorific for Udo Kier is only somewhat tongue in cheek, since he was actually enjoyable in Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula. And Henry Rollins can be non-horrible, but certainly didn't try very hard in this role. And, seriously, Dolph Lundgren? What the hell are people thinking when they give him a role? Besides, "I have a role that could be acted by a hamster. Wait, that would actually mean there was some acting talent involved. Damn, let's just get Dolph Lundgren." Anyway, the whole 80GB storage in Keanu Reeves's brain may actually be about accurate. I love that 320 is too much for him though. If you were to digitize memories, you'd come up with something much, much more than 320GB. Strange how that is. And it's 2021, and 320 GB is supposed to be a lot of space? I mean, I have 60 GB in a container that only five years ago used to hold 5 GB. Which means that by 2021, we're talking over 100 TB of data in a container the size of an iPod. And, of course, you wouldn't need the audio or video capacities, meaning it could be much smaller. Ridiculous just how small technology has become over the past few years. It's just an utterly ridiculous movie that probably would have been better had it been made ten years later by someone who was a talented director.