Johnny Mnemonic: in Black and White

Trapped somewhere between Blade Runner and The Matrix, aesthetically as well as chronologically, director Robert Longo's Johnny Mnemonic immediately benefits from any proximity to the latter, the project on which actor Keanu Reeves firmly ascended to his position as one of cyberpunk's holiest messiahs. The thirty years of real-life socioeconomic downturn that has occurred since cameras rolled on this adaptation of a William Gibson short story hasn't harmed the film either, with amateur futurologists noting that more or less every single worst case scenario threatened in Wired's 1997 article The Long Boom has come to pass (in some form) in the decades since. That which registered as pointedly downcast back in 1995, when Mnemonic was originally released, now plays like eerie prescience, particularly the idea that the unceasing data firing at human beings can have a palpable and even detrimental physiological effect. Although this information overload may not trigger the bodily ruptures described in Mnemonic, it'd be laughable to argue that the weaponised blurbs now blasting out of every person's pocket haven't melted a lot of people's brains into a reactionary goo. Re-released on home video in 2022 with a new colour grading that has tweaked Mnemonic to be monochromatic, Longo's film is now better able to present itself as queasy, ideas-driven science fiction rather than a failing attempt at an exciting, post-Speed blockbuster. In black and white, Reeves' face now reads as luminous and glaring: a light source destined to be imprisoned inside the headsets and hardware that the filmmakers have lifted straight out of Shinya Tsukamoto's seminal works of technological alienation, Tetsuo: The Iron Man and Tetsuo II: Body Hammer.