So I finally read the Gibson short story Johnny Mnemonic this past week, and as I had never seen the movie, thought i’d get that too.  Hmmmm…not so much.  While the short story is set in the Neuromancer/Count Zero/Mona Lisa Overdrive ‘universe’ of cyberpunk and The Sprawl – the movie just falls flat.  The director and Gibson himself (screenwriter) changed too many elements (IMHO) of the original – apparently Molly Millions was changed to ‘Jane’ due to someone else’s ownership rights, but the whole NAS thing is silly – the short story is just much more taut and effective.  The movie has many sequences that either lack dialog (where it’s needed) or have oddball distractions that don’t add to the plot, and the pacing of the movie isn’t very good, either.  Too many slow parts that could have been edited out, and the action sequences are fairly clumsy, too..

A few interesting things I noticed, however.  The LoTek clan’s hideout is on a burned out suspension bridge from Newark – echoes of his first Bridge Trilogy book Virtual Light (which had come out two years before this movie in 1993, although the ‘bridge’ in that trilogy was the Golden Gate Bridge in SF)?

Also, the look and feel crib (or steal, depending on your perspective) VERY HEAVILY from Max Headroom in a multitude of ways.  Astute cyberpunk fans could say that MH in turn stole from (or was certainly inspired by) Gibson himself, given that his first two cyberpunk books, Neuromancer and Count Zero, appeared before MH debuted.  It’s likely a tossup either way.  The ‘wasteland future’ look here might also have been influenced by the even earlier Escape from New York, too.

Johnny’s overloaded ‘head of data’ – billed as 120GB but ‘stuffed overfull’ at 320 GB – seems quaint at best now, given you can buy a TB-sized USB drive at Fry’s for around $150 these days.

It’s interesting to think that while this movie was a failure, Keanu would be back in cyberspace MUCH more successfully only a few years later as Neo in The Matrix.

Finally – the depiction of ‘The Internet’ as conceptualized by the Neuromancer series was thought for a long time the way we’d browse – sadly didn’t turn out that way, despite similar thinking as seen in say, The Lawnmower Man.

So read the story – skip the movie.

candybowl

So recently I remembered an old X-Files episode written by William Gibson (of cyberpunk fame) and Tom Maddox – Kill Switch. You can watch the whole thing on Vimeo here. Rather than spoil the plot (wikipedia linked earlier will do that if you read it), i will simply say this is an engaging and taut story definitely ahead of its time (originally broadcast on Feb 15, 1998). If you ever worry about Cold War technology, Skynet or the like, you should like this a lot.

Last night, I watched the second, later Gibson episode – First Person Shooter. This one aired on Freb 27, 2000 and did well ratings wise, even winning two Emmys. But while it’s well made, I found it fairly predictable (helps having the vantage point of watching it almost 11 years after broadcast :)) – and overly melodramatic. This episode is very similar in plot to a certain 1993 first-person shooter videogame we’re all familiar with (because it all but started the whole genre) but in some ways, less interesting. I’ve never been a huge fan of shooter videogames to begin with, so that may have biased my take too, not sure. This episode was in the Seventh Season of The X-Files, in case you want to rent it to watch.

candybowl