Johnny Mnemonic

[katikat]

Considering my mentioning Keanu Reeves' movies a short while ago, I decided to finally read the short story by William Gibson on which the movie Johnny Mnemonic was based. Since I saw the movie at the cinema all those years ago, I've seen people talk about how bad it was compared to the story. Time and time again. Over and over. So I wanted to check it out for myself. And...

I don't get it, the bashing, I mean. William Gibson's idea is nothing short of brilliant, that's true. A cyber punk story about a guy with a microchip implanted in his brain. Considering he wrote it in 1981, I was impressed - by the idea. The execution though, was hardly brilliant, I would even say poor.

The story is really short, in my e-book reader, it had only 29 pages. But short or not, the characters were two-dimensional and I didn't care one iota about them. The author obviously sacrificed character depth to a gimmicky setting. He filled this tiny piece with so much description and in such a rapid fire style that most of it just flew over my head. Yet the characters felt flat. Patricia Briggs, Mike Resnick and others proved that you can write a short story with deep characters that the reader can connect with. William Gibson, not so much. I was more interested in the Magnetic Dog Sisters - two tall women, one white, one black, lovers, one of them used to be a man - than in Johnny or Molly.

So, I can now honestly say that I like the movie much better. The film made me actually care about Johnny, about his survival - the short story did not.

But it's simply MADE for a TV series, a sci-fi procedural - a story about a guy with a storage chip in his head (Johnny Mnemonic) and his technologically enhanced bodyguard (Molly Millions). Why nobody has picked it up yet is beyond me *shrugs*