http://boingboing.net/2015/02/18/johnny ... -take.html
This part is somewhat interesting:
Taken as a metafictional product of a fictional cyberpunk dystopia, much of Johnny Mnemonic makes sense. By 1995, many of the predictions of cyberpunk were coming true. The internet was — and is — a place where people live and work and socialize. Liberalism slowly elevated corporate interests above national ones. We never did get the cybernetic arms or brain jacks, and nobody really wanted the virtual reality, but that’s like mistaking Heinlein’s classic The Moon is a Harsh Mistress for being about rocket ships or nuclear fusion. Science fiction is the fiction of ideas, and cyberpunk is fundamentally about how people come to terms with technological progress that has outpaced the ability of people to understand and morally adapt to it, in societies that feel as if they are “designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.”
In the same short story collection as “Johnny Mnemonic”, the novella this film is based on, is another, less famous story by William Gibson: “Gernsback Continuum”. This story, named for science fiction author Hugo Gernsback, is Gibson showing the full extent of Philip K. Dick’s influence on his writing. The story is about a photographer whose pictures (of what appear to be the cynical present of the 1980s) trigger visions of the Gernsback continuum, an idealized, brushed-aluminum-and-glass ideal of what golden age science fiction writers imagined the world would be like. The protagonist struggles with visions of spacesuits and zeppelins and flying wings, and it’s never clear if he’s seeing into and photographing an alternate timeline, or if he’s merely hallucinating. He can’t escape it until he throws himself entirely into the ugliest and seediest parts of reality, and even then, the doubt lingers.
Johnny Mnemonic almost works in this way, as metafiction produced by an implied Gibson continuum, the 1995 of the world that would go on to produce cyborgs and cyberspace. It almost forces the viewer to observe the technological and corporatist progress of their own lives. The blatant branding for fictional brands, the odd casting, the reversal of cultural sway. All of these could combine together to criticize the corporate machine that produced this movie, to criticize the hegemony of Hollywood.
In practice, though, Johnny Mnemonic only has an odd feeling of kitsch, as though it were the earnestly bad product of an only slightly different present. While much about cyberpunk holds true today, especially the core idea of culture shock caused by technological progress making life unrecognizable, Johnny Mnemonic falls into the gap where dystopic ideal met with dystopic reality. In a 2007 interview, Gibson described his writing as no longer being about the future, but rather “speculative fiction of the very recent past.” While Gibson caught up, and, in his own words used “a toolkit that was in large part provided by science fiction” to “a handle on the world today,” Johnny Mnemonic fell just short. But somewhere inside that deeply mediocre movie is a vision of that Gibson continuum, just out of reach.
