#also i dont at all understand the injection of this fake christian terminator assassin but he’s hilarious so i’m not mad

[fullmetalwindbreaker]

oh yeah i finally watched johnny mnemonic last night. my god is this one of the movies of all time. list of thoughts

- why he got the forest gump haircut

- i understand why people say the acting in this movie is “bad” but i think it’s mostly apt (especially in keanu reeves case) for characters living in an information-saturated state of society. like effectively most of them are on near mentally disabling amounts of stimulants at all times (just like celebrities in the 90s). ice t and henry rollins are the only ones who sound anything like normal human beings to me if i’m being honest. actually now i’m thinking about the scene where he flips out at the end and i think keanu reeves is a very good actor and he doesn’t get enough credit for shit like this

- they really did molly dirty, i guess i can’t be surprised she’s just reduced to a typical 90s action movie female lead exposition sidekick forced romantic interest, but it’s still a bummer. this was a decade after neuromancer was written, there’s so much more of her character to draw on, even if only to foreshadow, than was shown in the original short story. and instead they changed her character so much she doesn’t even have the same name

- i’m glad they included the bionic lesbian bodyguards in some capacity even though they’re not dog girls and there’s several predictably transphobic stereotypical moments

- everything overall seems much more low tech than the sprawl as originally described by my main man willy gibby, i understand how this is mostly a constraint of budget and the actual technology that could exist at the time, but it’s fascinating how it intersects with more broadly popular 90s grunge aesthetic, for example the lack of visible cybernetic augmentation on the previously mentioned lesbians. and switching the lo-tek hideout to a bridge instead of the underside of a city dome is less cool, but i can’t think of second choice that better fits the near-post-apocalyptic-wasteland shabby vibe going on. even the yakuza don’t look very rich or clean or put together

- very fascinating to look back at 30 year old ideas of what cyber society would be like, untethered from the contemporary ubiquity of banal surveillance. i feel like it would be relatively trivial now to find his brain code by looking up some semi-public record or archive of the tv broadcast they used to generate those key frames, but no one in the 90s saw that coming. i’m also thinking about how in watch dogs (video game) in fucking 2014 “corporate interests are gathering seemingly trivial data about your life, especially habits of consumption, especially media consumption” is portrayed as a thing that normal people often think is crazy or outlandish

- i’m also thinking about this quaint outdated view of information saturation contrasted with my real life avoidance of watching movies due to reliance on a different style of video entertainment that prioritizes breadth and volume, drop-in drop-out pause and switch between a dozen tabs at once style, compared to the often much more focused and intentionally continuous format of A Film, which is much harder to fully understand unless you watch it straight through in one sitting, which i rarely feel like i have time or mental dedication for

- do you have parents and stuff!?

-overall i’m not upset by the massive changes to the plot, i think for a movie it’s much better paced than a 1:1 of the original story would have been. i think they did a pretty good job expanding the original premise into a story with some actual stakes, even if cyber seizure disease and mommy ghost in the machine is a little on the nose. 8/10 movie but i might have to try watching it sober too

#also i dont at all understand the injection of this fake christian terminator assassin but he’s hilarious so i’m not mad #this post turned out much longer than i intended