William Gibson Interview on Johnny Mnemonic (May 18, 1995)
William Ford Gibson (born March 17, 1948) is an American-Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk. Beginning his writing career in the late 1970s, his early works were noir, near-future stories that explored the effects of technology, cybernetics, and computer networks on humans—a "combination of lowlife and high tech"[4]—and helped to create an iconography for the information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s.[5] Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" for "widespread, interconnected digital technology" in his short story "Burning Chrome" (1982), and later popularized the concept in his acclaimed debut novel Neuromancer (1984). These early works of Gibson's have been credited with "renovating" science fiction literature in the 1980s.
After expanding on the story in Neuromancer with two more novels (Count Zero in 1986 and Mona Lisa Overdrive in 1988), thus completing the dystopic Sprawl trilogy, Gibson collaborated with Bruce Sterling on the alternate history novel The Difference Engine (1990), which became an important work of the science fiction subgenre known as steampunk.
In the 1990s, Gibson composed the Bridge trilogy of novels, which explored the sociological developments of near-future urban environments, postindustrial society, and late capitalism. Following the turn of the century and the events of 9/11, Gibson emerged with a string of increasingly realist novels—Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country (2007), and Zero History (2010)—set in a roughly contemporary world. These works saw his name reach mainstream bestseller lists for the first time. His most recent novels, The Peripheral (2014) and Agency (2020), returned to a more overt engagement with technology and recognizable science fiction themes.
In 1999, The Guardian described Gibson as "probably the most important novelist of the past two decades", while The Sydney Morning Herald called him the "noir prophet" of cyberpunk.[6] Throughout his career, Gibson has written more than 20 short stories and 12 critically acclaimed novels (one in collaboration), contributed articles to several major publications, and collaborated extensively with performance artists, filmmakers, and musicians. His work has been cited as influencing a variety of disciplines: academia, design, film, literature, music, cyberculture, and technology.
Johnny Mnemonic is a 1995 cyberpunk action film[6] directed by Robert Longo in his feature directorial debut. William Gibson, who wrote the 1981 short story, wrote the screenplay. Keanu Reeves plays Johnny, a data courier with an overloaded brain implant designed to securely store confidential information. The film, set in 2021, portrays a dystopian future wracked by a tech-induced plague, awash with conspiracies, and dominated by megacorporations and organized crime. Takeshi Kitano portrays the CEO of a megacorporation attempting to suppress the data; he hires a psychopathic assassin played by Dolph Lundgren to do so. Ice-T and Dina Meyer co-star as Johnny's allies, a freedom fighter and a bodyguard, respectively.
Longo and Gibson originally envisioned making an art film on a small budget but failed to get financing from the studios.[10] Gibson said they wanted to avoid flashy, MTV-inspired visuals and "plunge the audience into a very strange but consistent universe".[9] Longo commented that the project "started out as an arty 1½-million-dollar movie, and it became a 30-million-dollar movie because we couldn't get a million and a half."[10]
The film holds an 18% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes from 38 reviews and an average rating of 4.1/10. The website's consensus reads, "As narratively misguided as it is woefully miscast, Johnny Mnemonic brings the '90s cyberpunk thriller to inane new whoas – er, lows."[34] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 36/100 based on 25 reviews, which the site terms "generally unfavorable reviews".[35] Variety's Todd McCarthy called the film "high-tech trash" and likened it to a video game.[36] Roger Ebert, the film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, gave the film two stars out of four and called it "one of the great goofy gestures of recent cinema".[37] Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly rated it C− and called it "a slack and derivative future-shock thriller".[38] Conversely, Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle described it as "inescapably a very cool movie",[39] and Marc Savlov wrote in The Austin Chronicle that the film works well for both Gibson fans and those unfamiliar with his work.[40] Writing in The New York Times, Caryn James called the film "a disaster in every way" and said that despite Gibson's involvement, the film comes off as "a shabby imitation of Blade Runner and Total Recall".[41]