Cyberpunk In The Movie Johnny Mnemonic

THE RISE AND FALL OF FILM GENRES

(CYBERPUNK)

By Chan Kok Seng What is Cyberpunk? For Starters, Cyberpunk is one of many subgenre of science fiction. According to Scalzi (2005), it is a mash of the Hard Science Fiction, Dystopian and New Wave sub-genres, in which that technology plays a prominent role but with much of the action takes place in a near future settings. The settings include virtual space of near-future computer network as well as societies that are transformed by rapid technological advancements. The genre itself has a profound history. In the beginning, the genre was used as a label to describe a new form of science fiction that were written by a group of five writers, Philip K. Dick, Roger Zelazny, J.G. Ballard, Philip

The movies that were include during those time period didn’t really sell out well. One of which is the movie Johnny Mnemonic (1995) directed by Robert Longo. The cyberspace action movie "Johnny Mnemonic" is one of those films based upon short stories by William Gibson. However, the film flopped both commercially and critically. The budget was used excessively on the well-known actors like Keanu Reeves, Dina Meyer, Ice-T, Dolph Lundgren, Udo Kier and Takeshi Kitano who was popular in Japan. This lead to an insufficient budget that focused less on other critical aspects of a good film such as quality assurance that created a mismatch with the director’s vision and the original novel

The film itself has many bad dialogue and not memorable as well as a terrible plot as it had a unbelievable and laughable ending. Despite the premise of film was interesting, the movie is still rather terrible and the actors did not do a good job in it. The film didn’t do well as its budget was $40 million as it only gross domestically $6,033,850 in the opening weekend with figures tailed down immediately. Only with the director’s cut included subsequently, the film recovered and managed to obtain minor success in worldwide, grossing over