Canadian science fiction comes of age: Johnny Mnemonic and Screamers have put Canada firmly on the international hipster sci-fi map

TAKE ONE, Spring, 1996 by Noah Cowan

Robert Longo's Johnny Mnemonic and Christian Duguay's Screamers have put Canada firmly on the international hipster sci-fi map. Largish budgets and massive North American release strategies testify to their commercial importance. Culturally, their cult status is guaranteed by unusually impressive literary pedigrees and innovative special effects. And while shock-jock Hollywood schtick might drive their high octane action, both films also touch on profound philosophical and sociological issues--issues which just might find resonance in an English-Canadian "tradition" of borrowing from the very best of this provocative genre.

Johnny (played by the Beirut-born, Toronto-trained Keanu Reeves) of Johnny Mnemonic--his surname is a futuristic trope never uttered in the film--is an information courier of the next millennium. He transports huge chunks of digitized information using a special implant in his cerebral cortex. Johnny's life consists of painfully uploading data, flying first class in sharp suits, and hiring formidably expensive hookers when his "drop" has been made. However, tiring of this glamorously empty existence, Johnny takes one last job to pay for the implant to be removed. This will enable him to upload his childhood memories, all of which have been removed to make room for the chip.

This last run smells bad from the start. Goofy, amateur Asian nerds make him upload far more data than his implant can safely handle. They are snuffed before faxing the access code to their contacts in Newark, leaving Johnny trashing around the detritus of New Jersey, trying to get the stuff sucked out of his brain.

Money--and he has lots--can usually fix such things. Trouble is that Johnny's chip carries the cure to a new technology-induced disease called NAS (a kind of MS meets epilepsy) which affects millions. Pharmacom, the all-powerful multinational which developed the cure, wants to protect its profits and so intends to suppress the information. Johnny's clients are renegade scientists, once employed by Pharmacom, who stole the cure information and destroyed the company's computer network doing it. Pharmacom employs the Yakuza, Japan's legendary Mafia, to get the information back. An enigmatic local boss, Takahashi (Takeshi Kitano), is "spoken to" through his computer by a "ghost in the machine," which insists that the information in Johnny's head is extremely important. Takahashi hires an insane, robotically enhanced preacher (Dolph Lundgren) to hunt Johnny down. Johnny manages to escape several decapitation attempts and survives seizures brought on by data leakage. He is helped by an NAS-afflicted female bodyguard and an underground network of technological terrorists called LoTeks, who interrupt a variety of media broadcasts with anti-corporate rants and practical medical information regarding NAS. They are based in a Jersey fortress called Heaven, the site of the film's final confrontation. Eventually Johnny must "hack" his own brain in order to save himself and the cure. ("Hacking" here involves special equipment -- visors, data gloves, etc.--to visualize all of the world's interconnected computer data. A "hacker" then literally breaks into the data "blocks," which are protected by "guards" and "viruses," as if one were picking a lock or battering down a door.) He does this with help of a Navy-enhanced, super-powerful dolphin.

The film, produced and released in Canada by the ever-growing media giant Alliance Communications, was neither a huge success at the box office nor among critics. Its complex plot and surfeit of improperly explained futuristic ideas may have scared people off, but, more likely, the film failed to satisfy audiences on such basic levels as character, dialogue and performance. The austere Johnny, so uncomfortable in his own skin, is actually served well by Reeves's characteristically stilted delivery; sadly, everyone else is playing the material with high camp histrionics, creating a decidedly messy tone. The film also suffers badly from an implausible love interest, played out in the style of recent B-grade Hollywood action pictures.

However, Johnny Mnemonic remains intriguing--and will have a long and happy video life--thanks to the voice of its screenwriter, Vancouver-based cult novelist William Gibson. His internationally celebrated trilogy of books, Necromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, shifted for good the style and substance of science fiction away from the humanism of 1950s masters like Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury, to a dense, technology-laden nihilism, christened "cyberpunk." He is surely the most influential figure in recent sci-fi, and Johnny Mnemonic bears his futuristic concerns writ large.

Gibson's future world has a rigid class structure, in which today's widening gap between rich and poor becomes much more pronounced. The rich are those who control the handful of omnipotent multinationals (they are often not actually human, but rather digitally preserved entrepreneurial barons of our era) and their lackeys. Everyone else is poor, hungry and diseased. Both classes are driven by computer-based technology, which controls every aspect of their lives. Cybernetic alterations have compromised most bodies, making everyone, in some sense, artificial. Deadly corporate battles are fought on a highly sophisticated form of the Internet. Yet, some still resist technological oppression. Led by a warrior from the richest class (usually a corporate assassin or a "data cowboy" who becomes alienated from his colleagues over issues such as corporate greed), freedom fighters marshal the disenfranchised and receive help from unusual pre-technology spirits (like voodoo gods). Their victories are significant, but small; the brutal social system always remains intact.