The climax was supposed to be a fight to the death between a vat-grown ninja with a spool of invisible monowire in a detachable thumb and a razorgirl with mirrors for eyes and retractable scalpels under her fingernails, on a web of cables laced with whitegoods, suspended hundreds of feet in the air inside a failed arcology, and wired to amplifiers and speakers. And they didn't bother because reasons, I guess.
you forgot the best part about the monowire: it was not even supposed to be an actual weapon. it was a kludged together item. The movie got rid of the best part of Johnny Mnemonic: MOLLY MILLIONS. She was the original cyberised boss babe with a tragic backstory. Before Rogue, or even Lucy kushinada ever existed.
I read an interview with Gibson where he states that Johnny Mnemonic was supposed to be an art film in the vein of Alphaville (no special effects, filmed in present day sets). That was his and the director's plan until the producers interfered and demanded effects, sets, etc. Not wanting it taken away from them, they did the best they could with what the producers wanted.
@@Rrgr5 I kinda feel like Looper counts too. Definitely nails that high-tech/low life vibe and there were very limited special effects. Oh and A Scanner Darkly, which does do that rotoscope animation thing, but other than that pretty basic character driven story. All great sci-fi/cyberpunk films that make you think about them long after you've left the theater.
YES. Kind of like a modern day Twilight Zone where each episode is a short story from the Burning Chrome compendium. Maybe animated. Narrated by Keanu. I would watch the hell out of that.
Take the "hacking the Gibson" scene from Hackers. Now stretch that Lazy Susan spinning of characters furiously typing on keyboards as images of "code" are superimposed over them and "cool" music blares at you. Congratulations. You've made Burning Chrome. That will be 200 million dollars. Cyberpunk died around the same time iMac appeared. I.e. When computers stopped being magical artifacts from the future, tools only the chosen few could even fathom let alone use - and became glorified TV-typewriter-recipee book. Soon to be replaced with supercomputers in every pocket so we could all enjoy propaganda as we count our steps. All -punk (including Punk) genres require simplification of some original artistic medium relying on "magical" aspect of technology used to achieve that -punkness. For Punk Rock it is the use of electric instruments without care for the rules, concentrating on the simplicity of the message rather than poetic imagery of sound and words - generally cause those bands weren't really any good at creating such imagery, either due to lack of talent or due to abuse of drugs and alcohol. What they had instead was youthful energy, complete disregard for societal and musical rules and norms and a very strong need to rebel against some larger societal force they often couldn't even describe properly - leaving it to the audience to plug themselves into that gap, finding what they were looking for. For cyberpunk it is simplification of sci-fi with tech-as-magic. With the tech at the time cyberpunk arose meant digital tools which were making the analog ones seemingly obsolete while coming off almost magical to the audience of that age. A two-deck stereo is pure science fiction to someone who was born in the age of 45s and 78s. A music player one wears on their body tuning out the world - that can only be magic. No wonder Gibson's hackers use "decks" to do their magic - it is technology encapsulated into a black box you plug yourself into. You don't know how it works. Just that it is magical. Thus, science fiction becomes science fantasy - where "viruses" equal spells and souls and spirits can become ghosts in the machine. The problem there is that THAT is nothing but fetishization of quickly obsolescing tech. Moore's law takes no prisoners. Gibson understood that and tried to move to more contemporary settings, attempting to make his artifacts more timeless in his later trilogies - except he relied too much on his intuition in understanding of metaphors other people used to describe something and extrapolating from there. E.g. He tried to do with systema, Russian oligarchy and the "rendering farms" what he did with the "computer virus" back in the day - grabbing onto a metaphor someone else came up with to describe something and extrapolating it into something he could imagine. Where he succeeded phenomenally back with the "virus" he failed comically with the above mentioned metaphors. E.g. He envisioned "rendering farms" (a now obsolete term for large banks of computers used to render movie-quality CGI back in the day) as Siberian prisons where prisoners would meticulously create videos drawing each frame on a computer, by hand. He makes similar errors elsewhere, later. Because tech is no longer magic. It is just tools. Very mundane tools. Might as well write about a cybermop... oh... wait... that's a Roomba. And someone actually did write a whole series about a magical Roomba. All the Dust that Falls. It's a parody.
Wut? Even stuff like the Belonging Kind where a dude discovers he's an alien because of small talk and bangs his new alien mate by touching hips on a bar stool? There's only a few Cyberpunk/Sprawl stories in the anthology. Johnny Mnemonic The Winter Market New Rose Hotel Burning Chrome
One day people will realise just how good johnny Pneumonic really is, Dolph Lundgren as cyber Jesus is pure genius Jokes aside Burning Chrome the story itself is one of my favourite short stories i haven't read the rest of the stories as i came across it in other onmibus' books Johnny Mnemonic just shows how the movie business knows how to ruin stories Willian Gibson has always been misinterpreted by Hollywood et al
Dolph Lundgren's character is my strongest memory from that movie. It was unexpected and fun, everything else is a bit blurry, but it's been a while. Oh, I vaguely remember Keanu ranting about a club sandwich and room service too. It may not be the iconic Cyberpunk flick it could/should have been, but I never hated it.
My understanding was that the replacement of Molly was necessitated because the film rights to the character were owned by someone else who had already optioned Neuromancer. Some of the changes may have been done to make her distinct enough to not be the same character, but I totally agree that giving her main plot beats to Johnny nerfs her and makes her an almost non-character.
@@be1tube I suspect the short stories acted like concept development for the novels. Even when he's not using the nearly exact character he's using the concepts, like in The Winter Market he has the drug addicted dream artist and you can see that as an early concept for Angie Mitchell the simstim star, and partly Mona.
Having recently just watched Johnny Mnemonic, I want to make a few observations 1) INSANE that the movie starts by telling us the setting is 2021 and there's a PANDEMIC 2) a good 90% of the tech absurdism in this movie is no longer absurd but a bleak reminder that tech companies indeed behave this way and I now would absolutely believe a company would build a "Memory Doubler" that's just an always-online USB that locks off half its storage unless you pay a subscription fee. And while nobody's worshipping technology like its a neo-Catholic church, online spaces have been a breeding ground for religious extremism that would easily result in Dolph Lundgren's character, if not his cybernetics, and Heny Rollins' boomer speech about people being glued to their screens feels like it was torn from a 2021 Facebook post 3) If it turned out tomorrow that there was a company whose board of directors were taking ALL their business advice from a Chat GPT, the only thing that would separate it from the random AI subplot is that we'd be finding out because Chapt GPT tanked their company. 4) I also realize that pretty much all of this predictive accuracy is thanks to the tech pessimism of William Gibson, but compared to many of the otherwise better-told cyberpunk movies, I personally think this one conveys his ideas the strongest. Perhaps in spite of itself, but nevertheless. 5) I want to get on line I NEED! A COMPUTER!
'I NEED! A COMPUTER!', is up there with 'I WANT ROOM SERVICE'. These are some good observations and I agree it was in some ways prophetic. As is all of Gibsons work. I just think in execution a lot of these themes go missing !
@@ifelse10110 I feel like this makes an all the stronger argument for it getting a remake. Although maybe that should've happened 5+ years ago, when all of the most troubling aspects of Gibson's stories hadn't already started happening irl...
If the Sprawl trilogy is to come to the screen, it needs to be a long-form series with a budget as big as it needs to be, and to follow the books to a T. No studio meddling, no swapping of characters, no "adjustments" to the story.
@@ifelse10110 Don't give it to Apple, they attempted to adapt Foundation; also not to Amazon, they made fake Tolkien with The Rings of Power. HBO did Game of Thrones pretty good until they ran out of source material - but they still cut a few things from the book.
I only found this out as I was finishing the script, it really recontextualized everything for me. Huge surprise considering how talented Gibson is. He can be added to the list of talented Authors who have written terrible screenplay !
He wrote a naff Alien 3 script too. He's a style writer; directors can't replicate his style and he can't adapt to the visual. In many ways he's like Raymond Chandler; most the noir visuals we associate with Chandler is a work of cinema, not prose. Most the Marlow books take place in the California sun.
If you dig up his screenplay for Neuromancer it is also terrible. It has a completely different and much worse ending, among other things. However, his teleplay for the X-Files is one of my favorite episodes, well before I knew he wrote it.
So low budget, gaudy visually and microscopic is scope. Felt like a student film with big talent like Willem Dafoe and Christopher Walken. Had cool concepts but see above.
I'll make a video on this too in the near future. It's so interesting that this movie was even produced. I've got to get through Three Body Problem series first though.
They released a B&W version of the move a couple years back and it actually really improves the movie. Instead of a 90s neon hyper sci-fi popcorn movie it’s like an art house sci-fi Nior.
That movie was the most dreadful disappointment I had ever experienced before (Robocop 2 included!). Somehow, B&W sounds like it would make a remarkable difference.
@ th-cam.com/video/sCu3oNilqOk/w-d-xo.htmlsi=CIjsMkTE8ep4m1iY I liked it a lot better. It just seems more like I said as more of a 90s art house sci fi movie.
Preach it to the skies! Storytelling 101: all stories are human stories. Your protagonist is best served by being the vessel, the suit they can climb into, the framework for how they want to identify as the character in the story. You have a contract with your audient that if they are willing to suspend their disbelief for a bit, you will give them a marvelous show. When you're doing it for profit and the Producers say change, you change. You always bring your A-game because it's what you love. Or mayybe it's just me. I dunno. Thoughts?
The character vs world building bit you have his really a story telling method. Plenty of world building author do so through character. GRRM is a easy example of it. Gibson does this as well.
Wait bro what?! It's been a long time since I read the collection, but the Gernsback continuum isn't in the sprawl is it? It felt like it was set in the 80's and I remember it being about a photographer photographic 50/60's aesthetics, esp those that were sci fi for the time, retro futuristic stuff. It was the only story in the book that I didn't really enjoy but I also didn't give it a real chance because it felt like it was set in our time and not in the sprawl! I loved Burning chrome and Johnny Mnemonic, Mnemonic also tying into the sprawl books since his girl Molly Millions is one of the major characters / protagonists of both Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive. But the stories that really stayed with me were Dog Fight and Hinterlands. "When Hiro hit the switch, I was dreaming of Paris, dreaming of wet, dark streets in winter. The pain came oscillating up from the floor of my skull, exploding behind my eyes in a wall of blue neon; I jackknifed up out of the mesh hammock, screaming. I always scream; I make a point of it." EDIT: I should really finish watching the video before writing more comments lol .. you mention it's not set in the sprawl not long after
Johnny is also in the Sprawl, and Bobby Quine is too. I believe there could be a mention of the Finn somewhere in this book. I could be mis-rremembering though.
Dogfight was really the only other story that stood out to me in the collection, but I don't really hate Johnny Mnemonic the way many do either. I love it for the little touches they managed to include. EDIT: ironically, the one scene I had in mind about appreciating the details, is the one that gets called out for being "cringy" (the electronics shop).
Bro, how do you only have 3.5k subs. I saw this video in my feed and imediately got excited for another good Sprawl vid. There are so few people even talking about any other book than Neuromancer. P.s. the best stories from Burning Chrome are Hinterlands and Dog Fight (Pretty sure dogfight is one of the earliest predictions of competitive gaming. I liked every single one of the stories, esp those that took place in the Sprawl. The one I liked least was the one about the photographer. It felt very out of place in the collection but did have a cool message in the end. EDIT: Haven't watched the video yet so I'm not even sure if this is just about the short story or the short story collection by the same name that also includes burning chrome the short story lol
I loved Dogfight as well, but due to time constraints and themes I went with just these three. Dogfights main character, I forget his name, is a really interesting character. Such a scumbag, I feel bad whenever I read that story because it's from his POV. Gibson is such a good writer, I could swap him out with people I have met and they could feasibly make the same crrappy decisions.
@@ifelse10110 The main character from Dogfight is an absolute monster! It's why I loved the story so much. It's such a quitnessentially cyberpunk story about a degen low life hahaha
books = non normies = few subs. pointing out ills of movies normies consume as there only perspective of topic = bad = no subs. I liked the movie, not read the book even though its on the very phone I'm typing this message from. Sadly, only cyberpunk books I've read is Shadowrun, and only like 15 of them before I gave up on books. Its sitting on this phone thru the SDcard I've had for 9+ years that got loaded with 130ish books back when I cared :(
what I'll never understand is why didn't they just adapt Neuromancer? It's a little less than 300 pages so perfect length to adapt into a film so you wouldn't have to change much and the premise is easy enough to pitch to general audiences. Basically a heist movie in the future. Come for the high tech thievery, stay for the philosophy
Excellent review. I've loved Johnny Mnemonic since I saw it in theaters, like a month after I'd first read Burning Chrome. I would never even attempt to argue that it's in any way a successful film 😂
What technology is behind the algorithm. In just re-reading Burning Chrome, and just finished re-reading Neuromancer. Gibson was absolutely peak at that time. The future he wrote about was groundbreaking. While I was helping to manage a BBS, here was real tales of a future that I could see coming true. Fast forward to today, most of Gibson’s stories are just as good. Although I’m still waiting for my own set of trodes so I can jack in.
You forgot The New Rose Hotel. Which a movie was made starring Christopher Walken and Willem Dafoe (the movie was boring and repetitive). Which Gibson even said was part of the trilogy. The Trilogy being Johnny Mnemonic, The New Rose Hotel, and Burning Chrome.
the best part about Johnny and Molly's story is how it ends: he does not escape the Yakuza for long. The yakuza gets him after a time, and Molly is left alone agian. She spends some time in the Sprawl Trilogy trying to find something to fill the hole left by Johhny's death. Her relationship with Case is the closest she ever gets to feeling close to someone else. Yet she chooses to not risk it.
The movie was directed by artist Robert Longo who makes amazing black and white art which could have been such a good fit. But that gamble unfortunately didn't pay off with studio interference trying to turn the low-budget movie into a keanu blockbuster (after Speed), forcing rewrites and control over the final cut. The prevailing sci-fi aesthetic of the time - colorful and silly - also didn't help. (Demolition Man, Fifth Element, only Verhoeven was able to use that to his advantage). It's so sad, it had the right people with the right intentions and it still didn't pan out.
You spend more time on the other short stories than on the film, which despite it's flaws, is still the only watchable big screen adaptation of Gibson's work. Like many fans, I've been waiting 40 years for Neuromancer to actually get made; Apple says they're going to finally do so. Until then, all we have is the almost 30-year-old Johnny Mnemonic, and the recent and excellent TV series The Peripheral, which Amazon cancelled after one season. (The film version of New Rose Hotel is so execrable, we can only hope it remains in obscurity.)
I saw New Rose Hotel as a screener when I was working at video stores back when that film was coming out and feeling like I was robbed when it cost me nothing to watch, and that was still too much
Having the video about cyberpunk illustrated by images with the porny-AI vibe is a reminder of the bleak times we live in, when even art is being taken away from humans.
Gibson's work is so very interesting because the man seemingly started a whole new genre of sci fi but with like........not actual concept of how technology worked? There's a rumor that he didn't actually buy a PC until much later in life and after a day took it back because it was making a weird noise. The people at the shop had to tell him 'that's the fan, it always makes noise'. The man wrote sci fi on how he FELT technology should work in his imagination rather then any base of knowledge. When you make a cyberpunk world based mostly on feeling you get a vision that's a lot harder to really adapt correctly then most other properties. I think it's why not only Johnny Mnemonic was a bit of mess but also why no one has been able to adapt Neuromancer up to this point. Considering Neuromancer is a significant entry of not only Sci Fi literature but the basis for a whole genre of fiction, it is shocking that no one has even really been able to attempt it.
Gibson not understanding tech is what made this series stay so relevent. Instead of attempting to predict exactly what the technology would be - he focused almost entirely on our relationship with it. It's why you can read it today and not think 'the tech in this is so dated' ! Thank you for your input :)
If a court says taking money from someone is illegal, doesn't that not only look like theft, but actually is theft? Or, rather, since they were armed isn't it armed robbery? These sorts of rulings should not just result in civil fines but criminal charges.
Dope aesthetic to all your uploads. Im working my way through all the older uploads and im really liking the visuals as well as the topics covered thus far. Instant subscribe. Keep it up bro!
the guy with the Mono Filament blade blew my fragile impressionable mind as a kid. Little Man has it in the Spriggan Anime Movie and Some ninja dude has something similar in an anime called Basilisk.
Another commenter said that the film rights to Molly were wrapped up in someone else trying to do Neuromancer, so it would have been out of Gibson's hands.
Great video. I should really reread Burning Chrome, it's been a while. My favorite story in Chrome, certainly the one that has stayed with me the most since I read it, is Hinterlands. What I took from it was on one hand some people's insatiable desire to explore, sometimes even at the cost of their own wellbeing, and on the other hand a corporate greed willing to feed people into a grinder if there is a chance they might get something they can tuen into profit as a result.
Did you use a mix of real illustrations/cover artworks and neurogenerated pictures? I recognize at least one artist I've seen before, while several other pictures ping on my genAI-dar very harshly.
Well look at the other cyberpunk movies around that time: Demolition Man, Judge Dredd (Stallone), Freejack, Hardware, Nemesis. Movie the studios saw as the genre wanted these kind of films and the studio are the ones who set the direction. I think there were other cyberpunk movies at that time that were much worse.
Mona Lisa Overdrive and its predecessor Neuromancer are fabulous…and UNFILMABLE ..or as with the current iterations of Dune ..required great talent to pull off.
Did you mention who this artist is? I might have missed it. I'm absolutely in love with these drawings. Please drop their name. I'd love to follow them.
I saw the movie and as soon as I saw that they replaced Molly Millions I knew it was at least half dogshit. Wasn't the worst film I've ever seen, kind of a throwback to 80s action cheese and didn't really convey the atmosphere of Gibson's Sprawl at all. Makes me wonder if anyone could ever really do the Sprawl justice on screen. About 2 years ago Amazon adopted Gibsons "The Peripheral" starring Chloe Grace Moretz and while I kind of liked it, I noticed that the show makers once again took a lot of liberties changing things around from the novel. Maybe Gibson only works well on printed page?
In a sense Matrix is already an adaptation of Neuromancer. And it is better than expected. I'm very happy about Neuromancer as a film never happened outside of that. It would have been a disaster.
Spiritual adaptation ! I read somewhere that while pitching the Matrix to prroducers, The Wachowskis referred to Johnny Mnemonic in a sort of 'That, but good' to describe the vibe they were going for.
@@ifelse10110 Yeah... I mean... It's quite close. All the characters came from Neuromancer. Even down to the two Rastafari from Zion that piloted the ship...
if people filmed Neuromancer now it would just look like a ripoff of all the films made in the meantime that were obviously inspired by the book (Inception, The Matrix etc)
New Rose Hotel (another short story in Burning Chrome got made into and film too. Christopher Walken and Willem Defoe! I loved it. I think The Belonging Kind was my fav in Burning Chrome. Really stuck with me.
The worst part (apart from the absurdly wooden acting of Reeves, Rollins and Lundgren and the cringeworthy dialog) was the "razorgirl" without the iconic implanted lenses - like in the artwork used by this channel lazily or ignorantly depicting her as wearing window glass eyeglasses...! Makes me wonder if the producers/writers are illiterate... I hope the makers of the HBO take on the Holy Grail of Cyberpunk novels, Neuromancer, FINALLY get this right, though amazon Prime's "The Peripheral" adaptation, despite considerable artistic license, or actually, because of it, was even better than the original novel which I have read thrice, in addition to it's sequel, Agency, while looking forward to the third installment of the Jackpot trilogy coming soon! Peripheral was cancelled too soon, of course, like all breathtakingly compelling series like "Raised by Wolves", and "The Man who Fell to Earth" or Theo James' "The Time Traveller's Wife"...! The titanic "atmosphere scrubbers" of post-Jackpot London , described in the book simply as monolithic cubes towering avove the London skyline were portrayed in the series as gargantuan heroic sculptures! That decision alone lifted the series above the book, but there was more - a gifted, genuinely transgender actor for the role of Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer and a suitably diverse cast! I hope this bodes well for the HBO Neuromancer adaptation!
I really liked Johnny mnemonic. The story is great, the script is great, the visualization of concepts and technologies by the art department, particularly for the time was excellent, set design was on point. It was overacted though in a way that for a few key moments take you out of the film. At that time though there weren't really popular comic films and hard sci-fi wasn't particularly popular either, very niche. It want until the matrix when sci-fi was begining to get mainstream success on the big screen outside of like blade runner and more action oriented sci-fi like Star wars. It feels like asking a movie fire to really think about what is being shown instead of being led from ato b to c isnt something in which people are willing to invest. Particularly when it comes to societal exploration and introspection.
I haven't seen the movie since I saw it in the theatre in its original release, so my 30 year-old memory is a pretty solid disappointed 'meh'. I recall hyping it up to friends to get them to come with me, I mean, how can it go wrong when the author does the screenplay, but...meh. Burning Chrome + 3xSprawl is a once-in-a-lifetime string of reading, I'm sort of wary now of it being brought to TV or film.
and this is why I don't consider The Matrix to be Cyberpunk. it has no commentary on corporations or class, there is no degraded dream only a present broken by war
tell you this already, only 2 minutes in, i really love johnny mnemonic, i watched it as a kid and thought it was awesome and i still think it's awesome. it gets way too bad a rep and really is one of the all time classics of cyberpunk film. guess i'll let you know if i change my mind at the end of this
@sorewahimitsudesu -Gibson said they didn’t use Molly Millions aka Sally Sheers in Johnny Mnemonic because they wanted to keep the franchise’s separate from Neuromancer…
Except she's always been alluded to being the same person. Theres a bunch of clues in neuromancer that match up to scenes from johnny nmonic short story
I believe its mentioned in Neuromancer that Molly had a relationship with a man who is hinted at being Johnny. This relationship occuring before the events of Neuromancer.
this movie is hilariously terrible which i a shame cause everyone is bringing there A game and there was prob a great movie left on the cutting room floor
Oh Yeah, Johnny Mnemonic is easily one of the WORST adaptations in existence, next to Paramount's fraudulent, apocryphal HALO show and David Lynch's art-wank Dune [1984]. At least Johnny Mnemonic had that Takeshi Kitano cameo to carry it.
Okay, I stopped watching -- a minute in -- as soon as you made it clear you have no clue that _Johnny Mnemonic_ is only one short story in the _Burning Chrome_ book, which is the short story the book is named after. This is what happens when you have no clue what you're talking about and use an A.I. script to "generate content".
ego and big hot shot ego heads, ruin too many good universes . Look at Witcher...that team had the book series, well write and love by many with a huge lore behind, they had also the series of video games also very well done and love by many fans [best live storyboard for a movie]. And with all ready to be just adjusted a little and made in a saga as big as GoT series, and still those morons from Petflix manage to make it garbage, to destroy it....and for what ? For social activism ? Those target by social activism where not interested by this...and the army of fans of Witcher did not watch it anymore. I know from beginning that is gonna be a flop, from one small detail...the wolf medallion was bad design and did not matter much in the story [not like in books and in games]
"We removed all the coolest characters, elements, and scenes from the story, we really can't figure out what went wrong."
The climax was supposed to be a fight to the death between a vat-grown ninja with a spool of invisible monowire in a detachable thumb and a razorgirl with mirrors for eyes and retractable scalpels under her fingernails, on a web of cables laced with whitegoods, suspended hundreds of feet in the air inside a failed arcology, and wired to amplifiers and speakers.
And they didn't bother because reasons, I guess.
The reasons being a lack of creative vision for sure !
you forgot the best part about the monowire: it was not even supposed to be an actual weapon. it was a kludged together item. The movie got rid of the best part of Johnny Mnemonic: MOLLY MILLIONS. She was the original cyberised boss babe with a tragic backstory. Before Rogue, or even Lucy kushinada ever existed.
Remember the story ending though, ninja just kinda jumps to his death and Gibson is like "Killed by culture shock! Heh!" *Pats himself on the back*
I read an interview with Gibson where he states that Johnny Mnemonic was supposed to be an art film in the vein of Alphaville (no special effects, filmed in present day sets). That was his and the director's plan until the producers interfered and demanded effects, sets, etc. Not wanting it taken away from them, they did the best they could with what the producers wanted.
TBH, the original plan sounds weak too.
apparently, they didn't do the best they could. this was an artistic failure and it's on them.
@RecklessFables not quite, Paycheck was a cyberpunk made like that, Repo Man and Minority Report aren't that different either.
@@Rrgr5 I kinda feel like Looper counts too. Definitely nails that high-tech/low life vibe and there were very limited special effects. Oh and A Scanner Darkly, which does do that rotoscope animation thing, but other than that pretty basic character driven story. All great sci-fi/cyberpunk films that make you think about them long after you've left the theater.
You'd like New Rose Hotel
whats really sad is Burning Chrome would make for a great mini series adapting each story to 20 min or so.
Oh gods yes
YES. Kind of like a modern day Twilight Zone where each episode is a short story from the Burning Chrome compendium. Maybe animated. Narrated by Keanu. I would watch the hell out of that.
Yeah! I can't believe the only story from the book adapted so far is 'New Rose Hotel'.
edit: So I had completely forgotten Johnny Mnemonic lol.
Take the "hacking the Gibson" scene from Hackers. Now stretch that Lazy Susan spinning of characters furiously typing on keyboards as images of "code" are superimposed over them and "cool" music blares at you.
Congratulations. You've made Burning Chrome. That will be 200 million dollars.
Cyberpunk died around the same time iMac appeared. I.e. When computers stopped being magical artifacts from the future, tools only the chosen few could even fathom let alone use - and became glorified TV-typewriter-recipee book. Soon to be replaced with supercomputers in every pocket so we could all enjoy propaganda as we count our steps.
All -punk (including Punk) genres require simplification of some original artistic medium relying on "magical" aspect of technology used to achieve that -punkness.
For Punk Rock it is the use of electric instruments without care for the rules, concentrating on the simplicity of the message rather than poetic imagery of sound and words - generally cause those bands weren't really any good at creating such imagery, either due to lack of talent or due to abuse of drugs and alcohol.
What they had instead was youthful energy, complete disregard for societal and musical rules and norms and a very strong need to rebel against some larger societal force they often couldn't even describe properly - leaving it to the audience to plug themselves into that gap, finding what they were looking for.
For cyberpunk it is simplification of sci-fi with tech-as-magic. With the tech at the time cyberpunk arose meant digital tools which were making the analog ones seemingly obsolete while coming off almost magical to the audience of that age.
A two-deck stereo is pure science fiction to someone who was born in the age of 45s and 78s. A music player one wears on their body tuning out the world - that can only be magic.
No wonder Gibson's hackers use "decks" to do their magic - it is technology encapsulated into a black box you plug yourself into. You don't know how it works. Just that it is magical.
Thus, science fiction becomes science fantasy - where "viruses" equal spells and souls and spirits can become ghosts in the machine.
The problem there is that THAT is nothing but fetishization of quickly obsolescing tech. Moore's law takes no prisoners.
Gibson understood that and tried to move to more contemporary settings, attempting to make his artifacts more timeless in his later trilogies - except he relied too much on his intuition in understanding of metaphors other people used to describe something and extrapolating from there.
E.g. He tried to do with systema, Russian oligarchy and the "rendering farms" what he did with the "computer virus" back in the day - grabbing onto a metaphor someone else came up with to describe something and extrapolating it into something he could imagine.
Where he succeeded phenomenally back with the "virus" he failed comically with the above mentioned metaphors.
E.g. He envisioned "rendering farms" (a now obsolete term for large banks of computers used to render movie-quality CGI back in the day) as Siberian prisons where prisoners would meticulously create videos drawing each frame on a computer, by hand.
He makes similar errors elsewhere, later.
Because tech is no longer magic.
It is just tools. Very mundane tools. Might as well write about a cybermop... oh... wait... that's a Roomba. And someone actually did write a whole series about a magical Roomba.
All the Dust that Falls. It's a parody.
Wut? Even stuff like the Belonging Kind where a dude discovers he's an alien because of small talk and bangs his new alien mate by touching hips on a bar stool?
There's only a few Cyberpunk/Sprawl stories in the anthology.
Johnny Mnemonic
The Winter Market
New Rose Hotel
Burning Chrome
One day people will realise just how good johnny Pneumonic really is, Dolph Lundgren as cyber Jesus is pure genius
Jokes aside Burning Chrome the story itself is one of my favourite short stories i haven't read the rest of the stories as i came across it in other onmibus' books Johnny Mnemonic just shows how the movie business knows how to ruin stories Willian Gibson has always been misinterpreted by Hollywood et al
Dolph Lundgren's character is my strongest memory from that movie. It was unexpected and fun, everything else is a bit blurry, but it's been a while. Oh, I vaguely remember Keanu ranting about a club sandwich and room service too. It may not be the iconic Cyberpunk flick it could/should have been, but I never hated it.
Pneumonic lol. Data that somehow runs Pneumatically.
My understanding was that the replacement of Molly was necessitated because the film rights to the character were owned by someone else who had already optioned Neuromancer. Some of the changes may have been done to make her distinct enough to not be the same character, but I totally agree that giving her main plot beats to Johnny nerfs her and makes her an almost non-character.
I didn't realize they were the same character. I read the stories as independent and thought Gibson just had a thing for that type.
@@be1tube I suspect the short stories acted like concept development for the novels. Even when he's not using the nearly exact character he's using the concepts, like in The Winter Market he has the drug addicted dream artist and you can see that as an early concept for Angie Mitchell the simstim star, and partly Mona.
Having recently just watched Johnny Mnemonic, I want to make a few observations
1) INSANE that the movie starts by telling us the setting is 2021 and there's a PANDEMIC
2) a good 90% of the tech absurdism in this movie is no longer absurd but a bleak reminder that tech companies indeed behave this way and I now would absolutely believe a company would build a "Memory Doubler" that's just an always-online USB that locks off half its storage unless you pay a subscription fee. And while nobody's worshipping technology like its a neo-Catholic church, online spaces have been a breeding ground for religious extremism that would easily result in Dolph Lundgren's character, if not his cybernetics, and Heny Rollins' boomer speech about people being glued to their screens feels like it was torn from a 2021 Facebook post
3) If it turned out tomorrow that there was a company whose board of directors were taking ALL their business advice from a Chat GPT, the only thing that would separate it from the random AI subplot is that we'd be finding out because Chapt GPT tanked their company.
4) I also realize that pretty much all of this predictive accuracy is thanks to the tech pessimism of William Gibson, but compared to many of the otherwise better-told cyberpunk movies, I personally think this one conveys his ideas the strongest. Perhaps in spite of itself, but nevertheless.
5) I want to get on line I NEED! A COMPUTER!
'I NEED! A COMPUTER!', is up there with 'I WANT ROOM SERVICE'.
These are some good observations and I agree it was in some ways prophetic. As is all of Gibsons work. I just think in execution a lot of these themes go missing !
@@ifelse10110 I feel like this makes an all the stronger argument for it getting a remake. Although maybe that should've happened 5+ years ago, when all of the most troubling aspects of Gibson's stories hadn't already started happening irl...
If the Sprawl trilogy is to come to the screen, it needs to be a long-form series with a budget as big as it needs to be, and to follow the books to a T. No studio meddling, no swapping of characters, no "adjustments" to the story.
Fully agree, let's hope Apple doesn't mess it up.
@@ifelse10110 Don't give it to Apple, they attempted to adapt Foundation; also not to Amazon, they made fake Tolkien with The Rings of Power. HBO did Game of Thrones pretty good until they ran out of source material - but they still cut a few things from the book.
va-11 halla does a better job getting across a visual of every gibson intro bar scene than any cyberpunk adaptation i've ever seen
cyberpunk 2077 would be second
I had no idea he had written that screenplay and I cannot for the life of me makes sense of that. Awesome video.
I only found this out as I was finishing the script, it really recontextualized everything for me. Huge surprise considering how talented Gibson is. He can be added to the list of talented Authors who have written terrible screenplay !
He wrote a naff Alien 3 script too.
He's a style writer; directors can't replicate his style and he can't adapt to the visual.
In many ways he's like Raymond Chandler; most the noir visuals we associate with Chandler is a work of cinema, not prose. Most the Marlow books take place in the California sun.
If you dig up his screenplay for Neuromancer it is also terrible. It has a completely different and much worse ending, among other things. However, his teleplay for the X-Files is one of my favorite episodes, well before I knew he wrote it.
It's like the Stallone Judge Dredd movie: fundamentally misunderstood what makes the genre work as a whole world system.
I'll add this to my list of futurre videos, the movie DREDD got it bang on in comparison.
Abel Ferrara’s “New Rose Hotel” adaptation off “Burning Chrome” was so much much worse.
So low budget, gaudy visually and microscopic is scope. Felt like a student film with big talent like Willem Dafoe and Christopher Walken. Had cool concepts but see above.
I'll make a video on this too in the near future. It's so interesting that this movie was even produced. I've got to get through Three Body Problem series first though.
@@stephenlanoue5041 it’s a darn shame because Ferrara’s “King Of New York”, “Bad Lieutenant”, and “The Addiction” are so good.
They released a B&W version of the move a couple years back and it actually really improves the movie. Instead of a 90s neon hyper sci-fi popcorn movie it’s like an art house sci-fi Nior.
That movie was the most dreadful disappointment I had ever experienced before (Robocop 2 included!). Somehow, B&W sounds like it would make a remarkable difference.
@ th-cam.com/video/sCu3oNilqOk/w-d-xo.htmlsi=CIjsMkTE8ep4m1iY I liked it a lot better. It just seems more like I said as more of a 90s art house sci fi movie.
Preach it to the skies!
Storytelling 101: all stories are human stories.
Your protagonist is best served by being the vessel, the suit they can climb into, the framework for how they want to identify as the character in the story.
You have a contract with your audient that if they are willing to suspend their disbelief for a bit, you will give them a marvelous show.
When you're doing it for profit and the Producers say change, you change. You always bring your A-game because it's what you love.
Or mayybe it's just me.
I dunno. Thoughts?
Fully agree.
The character vs world building bit you have his really a story telling method. Plenty of world building author do so through character. GRRM is a easy example of it. Gibson does this as well.
Wait bro what?! It's been a long time since I read the collection, but the Gernsback continuum isn't in the sprawl is it? It felt like it was set in the 80's and I remember it being about a photographer photographic 50/60's aesthetics, esp those that were sci fi for the time, retro futuristic stuff. It was the only story in the book that I didn't really enjoy but I also didn't give it a real chance because it felt like it was set in our time and not in the sprawl! I loved Burning chrome and Johnny Mnemonic, Mnemonic also tying into the sprawl books since his girl Molly Millions is one of the major characters / protagonists of both Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive. But the stories that really stayed with me were Dog Fight and Hinterlands.
"When Hiro hit the switch, I was dreaming of Paris, dreaming of wet, dark streets in winter. The pain came oscillating up from the floor of my skull, exploding behind my eyes in a wall of blue neon; I jackknifed up out of the mesh hammock, screaming. I always scream; I make a point of it."
EDIT: I should really finish watching the video before writing more comments lol .. you mention it's not set in the sprawl not long after
Johnny is also in the Sprawl, and Bobby Quine is too. I believe there could be a mention of the Finn somewhere in this book. I could be mis-rremembering though.
@@ifelse10110 Burning Chrome story
Dogfight was really the only other story that stood out to me in the collection, but I don't really hate Johnny Mnemonic the way many do either. I love it for the little touches they managed to include.
EDIT: ironically, the one scene I had in mind about appreciating the details, is the one that gets called out for being "cringy" (the electronics shop).
Bro, how do you only have 3.5k subs. I saw this video in my feed and imediately got excited for another good Sprawl vid. There are so few people even talking about any other book than Neuromancer. P.s. the best stories from Burning Chrome are Hinterlands and Dog Fight (Pretty sure dogfight is one of the earliest predictions of competitive gaming. I liked every single one of the stories, esp those that took place in the Sprawl. The one I liked least was the one about the photographer. It felt very out of place in the collection but did have a cool message in the end.
EDIT: Haven't watched the video yet so I'm not even sure if this is just about the short story or the short story collection by the same name that also includes burning chrome the short story lol
I loved Dogfight as well, but due to time constraints and themes I went with just these three. Dogfights main character, I forget his name, is a really interesting character. Such a scumbag, I feel bad whenever I read that story because it's from his POV.
Gibson is such a good writer, I could swap him out with people I have met and they could feasibly make the same crrappy decisions.
@@ifelse10110 The main character from Dogfight is an absolute monster! It's why I loved the story so much. It's such a quitnessentially cyberpunk story about a degen low life hahaha
books = non normies = few subs.
pointing out ills of movies normies consume as there only perspective of topic = bad = no subs.
I liked the movie, not read the book even though its on the very phone I'm typing this message from. Sadly, only cyberpunk books I've read is Shadowrun, and only like 15 of them before I gave up on books. Its sitting on this phone thru the SDcard I've had for 9+ years that got loaded with 130ish books back when I cared :(
what I'll never understand is why didn't they just adapt Neuromancer? It's a little less than 300 pages so perfect length to adapt into a film so you wouldn't have to change much and the premise is easy enough to pitch to general audiences. Basically a heist movie in the future. Come for the high tech thievery, stay for the philosophy
It also lends itself to sequels as well. Latest news is that Apple TV will be lanching a TV show based on it.
Don't know anything about the people making it but hopefully with the success of Cyberpunk 2077 and Edgerunners. It might get the attention it needs
Excellent review. I've loved Johnny Mnemonic since I saw it in theaters, like a month after I'd first read Burning Chrome. I would never even attempt to argue that it's in any way a successful film 😂
Its the best bad movie I have ever seeen ! 😂
Thank god. I hope there is never a film adaptation of Neuromancer.
So then you've not heard about the Neuromancer adaptation that Apple is making. I'm honestly a bit worried
@@3choblast3r4really? then it's DOA.
What technology is behind the algorithm. In just re-reading Burning Chrome, and just finished re-reading Neuromancer. Gibson was absolutely peak at that time. The future he wrote about was groundbreaking. While I was helping to manage a BBS, here was real tales of a future that I could see coming true. Fast forward to today, most of Gibson’s stories are just as good. Although I’m still waiting for my own set of trodes so I can jack in.
Me too man, me too. Waiting for the day that I can interface directly with cyberspace.
You forgot The New Rose Hotel. Which a movie was made starring Christopher Walken and Willem Dafoe (the movie was boring and repetitive). Which Gibson even said was part of the trilogy. The Trilogy being Johnny Mnemonic, The New Rose Hotel, and Burning Chrome.
It's on my list of videos to make :)
the best part about Johnny and Molly's story is how it ends: he does not escape the Yakuza for long. The yakuza gets him after a time, and Molly is left alone agian. She spends some time in the Sprawl Trilogy trying to find something to fill the hole left by Johhny's death. Her relationship with Case is the closest she ever gets to feeling close to someone else. Yet she chooses to not risk it.
The movie was directed by artist Robert Longo who makes amazing black and white art which could have been such a good fit. But that gamble unfortunately didn't pay off with studio interference trying to turn the low-budget movie into a keanu blockbuster (after Speed), forcing rewrites and control over the final cut. The prevailing sci-fi aesthetic of the time - colorful and silly - also didn't help. (Demolition Man, Fifth Element, only Verhoeven was able to use that to his advantage). It's so sad, it had the right people with the right intentions and it still didn't pan out.
Remember the did New Rose Hotel with Christopher Walken and Willem Dafoe too and it didn't do great either.
You spend more time on the other short stories than on the film, which despite it's flaws, is still the only watchable big screen adaptation of Gibson's work. Like many fans, I've been waiting 40 years for Neuromancer to actually get made; Apple says they're going to finally do so. Until then, all we have is the almost 30-year-old Johnny Mnemonic, and the recent and excellent TV series The Peripheral, which Amazon cancelled after one season. (The film version of New Rose Hotel is so execrable, we can only hope it remains in obscurity.)
I saw New Rose Hotel as a screener when I was working at video stores back when that film was coming out and feeling like I was robbed when it cost me nothing to watch, and that was still too much
Oh man, that movie is just so bad. It's on my list of potential video themes.
Having the video about cyberpunk illustrated by images with the porny-AI vibe is a reminder of the bleak times we live in, when even art is being taken away from humans.
Gibson's work is so very interesting because the man seemingly started a whole new genre of sci fi but with like........not actual concept of how technology worked? There's a rumor that he didn't actually buy a PC until much later in life and after a day took it back because it was making a weird noise. The people at the shop had to tell him 'that's the fan, it always makes noise'.
The man wrote sci fi on how he FELT technology should work in his imagination rather then any base of knowledge. When you make a cyberpunk world based mostly on feeling you get a vision that's a lot harder to really adapt correctly then most other properties. I think it's why not only Johnny Mnemonic was a bit of mess but also why no one has been able to adapt Neuromancer up to this point. Considering Neuromancer is a significant entry of not only Sci Fi literature but the basis for a whole genre of fiction, it is shocking that no one has even really been able to attempt it.
Gibson not understanding tech is what made this series stay so relevent. Instead of attempting to predict exactly what the technology would be - he focused almost entirely on our relationship with it. It's why you can read it today and not think 'the tech in this is so dated' ! Thank you for your input :)
Yo, who did the art in the video?
I also want to know where it's from!
If a court says taking money from someone is illegal, doesn't that not only look like theft, but actually is theft? Or, rather, since they were armed isn't it armed robbery? These sorts of rulings should not just result in civil fines but criminal charges.
it's not "queen" it's "kwine" jesus.
Dope aesthetic to all your uploads. Im working my way through all the older uploads and im really liking the visuals as well as the topics covered thus far. Instant subscribe. Keep it up bro!
Glad you like them!
@@ifelse10110I also love your visuals! Can you credit the artists or publications you use, or are these all your original artworks? Thanks!
the guy with the Mono Filament blade blew my fragile impressionable mind as a kid. Little Man has it in the Spriggan Anime Movie and Some ninja dude has something similar in an anime called Basilisk.
Preach it, brother! Damn I love this channel.
Very interesting. I had heard years ago that they replaced Molly in the movie due to a rights issue. If Gibson wrote the adaptation, though... 🤔
Another commenter said that the film rights to Molly were wrapped up in someone else trying to do Neuromancer, so it would have been out of Gibson's hands.
@The_Empty_Shadow ahhh, that could explain it
Great video. I should really reread Burning Chrome, it's been a while.
My favorite story in Chrome, certainly the one that has stayed with me the most since I read it, is Hinterlands. What I took from it was on one hand some people's insatiable desire to explore, sometimes even at the cost of their own wellbeing, and on the other hand a corporate greed willing to feed people into a grinder if there is a chance they might get something they can tuen into profit as a result.
Meh... I still like the movie... watch it about once a year when I'm a cyberpunk kick. :)
Where are the images from? Is this some sort of William Gibson Comic? They look awesome.
And they should absolutely do neuromancer and the rest in animation. Probably the one genre Netflix produced creations are actually excellent.
johnny mnemonic is amazing. you're insane
totally agree all my favorite stuff has interesting characters over all first to even care about any story .
Did you use a mix of real illustrations/cover artworks and neurogenerated pictures?
I recognize at least one artist I've seen before, while several other pictures ping on my genAI-dar very harshly.
Yeah
Still way way better than the New Rose Hotel adaptation.
I think the movie "New Rose Hotel" did a better job personaly.
It was hot the night we burned Chrome.
Well look at the other cyberpunk movies around that time: Demolition Man, Judge Dredd (Stallone), Freejack, Hardware, Nemesis. Movie the studios saw as the genre wanted these kind of films and the studio are the ones who set the direction. I think there were other cyberpunk movies at that time that were much worse.
Mona Lisa Overdrive and its predecessor Neuromancer are fabulous…and UNFILMABLE ..or as with the current iterations of Dune ..required great talent to pull off.
The same was said about Dune, lets hope Apple can prove us all wrong and make a good series !
Did you mention who this artist is? I might have missed it. I'm absolutely in love with these drawings. Please drop their name. I'd love to follow them.
I saw the movie and as soon as I saw that they replaced Molly Millions I knew it was at least half dogshit. Wasn't the worst film I've ever seen, kind of a throwback to 80s action cheese and didn't really convey the atmosphere of Gibson's Sprawl at all. Makes me wonder if anyone could ever really do the Sprawl justice on screen. About 2 years ago Amazon adopted Gibsons "The Peripheral" starring Chloe Grace Moretz and while I kind of liked it, I noticed that the show makers once again took a lot of liberties changing things around from the novel. Maybe Gibson only works well on printed page?
The incoming Neuromancer series is gonna re-kill it.
😬 Uh oh
In a sense Matrix is already an adaptation of Neuromancer. And it is better than expected.
I'm very happy about Neuromancer as a film never happened outside of that. It would have been a disaster.
Spiritual adaptation ! I read somewhere that while pitching the Matrix to prroducers, The Wachowskis referred to Johnny Mnemonic in a sort of 'That, but good' to describe the vibe they were going for.
@@ifelse10110 Yeah... I mean... It's quite close. All the characters came from Neuromancer. Even down to the two Rastafari from Zion that piloted the ship...
if people filmed Neuromancer now it would just look like a ripoff of all the films made in the meantime that were obviously inspired by the book (Inception, The Matrix etc)
The only two things that the movie got right were the Matrix and the SQUID. Everything else was as they say, dogwater.
Where does your artwork come from?
Seems to be mostly AI-generated. How fitting.
@@mikhailryzhov9419 nah the majority of this videos artwork is from an artist called deathburger
@burnerzeroone-o8p Thanks, this guy looks like he is worth checking out.
Sue me but I loved Johnny Mnemonic. It's a seriously guilty pleasure for me. Schlocky fun.
The short story was good, but the movie removed most of the stuff that made it good.
New Rose Hotel (another short story in Burning Chrome got made into and film too. Christopher Walken and Willem Defoe! I loved it.
I think The Belonging Kind was my fav in Burning Chrome. Really stuck with me.
I'll check it out!
Do you do your own art for these?
The artworks were made by Deathburger
Do that movie with todays tech and you have a Michael Mann meets dark knight level movie
My unpopular opinion id if Gibson has STFU the film would be a beloved camp classic like Robocop or Escape From New York.
The worst part (apart from the absurdly wooden acting of Reeves, Rollins and Lundgren and the cringeworthy dialog) was the "razorgirl" without the iconic implanted lenses - like in the artwork used by this channel lazily or ignorantly depicting her as wearing window glass eyeglasses...! Makes me wonder if the producers/writers are illiterate... I hope the makers of the HBO take on the Holy Grail of Cyberpunk novels, Neuromancer, FINALLY get this right, though amazon Prime's "The Peripheral" adaptation, despite considerable artistic license, or actually, because of it, was even better than the original novel which I have read thrice, in addition to it's sequel, Agency, while looking forward to the third installment of the Jackpot trilogy coming soon! Peripheral was cancelled too soon, of course, like all breathtakingly compelling series like "Raised by Wolves", and "The Man who Fell to Earth" or Theo James' "The Time Traveller's Wife"...! The titanic "atmosphere scrubbers" of post-Jackpot London , described in the book simply as monolithic cubes towering avove the London skyline were portrayed in the series as gargantuan heroic sculptures! That decision alone lifted the series above the book, but there was more - a gifted, genuinely transgender actor for the role of Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer and a suitably diverse cast! I hope this bodes well for the HBO Neuromancer adaptation!
7:26 that comment is out of pocket, lol chrome dome on the poor guy.
I really liked Johnny mnemonic. The story is great, the script is great, the visualization of concepts and technologies by the art department, particularly for the time was excellent, set design was on point. It was overacted though in a way that for a few key moments take you out of the film. At that time though there weren't really popular comic films and hard sci-fi wasn't particularly popular either, very niche. It want until the matrix when sci-fi was begining to get mainstream success on the big screen outside of like blade runner and more action oriented sci-fi like Star wars. It feels like asking a movie fire to really think about what is being shown instead of being led from ato b to c isnt something in which people are willing to invest. Particularly when it comes to societal exploration and introspection.
I haven't seen the movie since I saw it in the theatre in its original release, so my 30 year-old memory is a pretty solid disappointed 'meh'. I recall hyping it up to friends to get them to come with me, I mean, how can it go wrong when the author does the screenplay, but...meh. Burning Chrome + 3xSprawl is a once-in-a-lifetime string of reading, I'm sort of wary now of it being brought to TV or film.
and this is why I don't consider The Matrix to be Cyberpunk. it has no commentary on corporations or class, there is no degraded dream only a present broken by war
tell you this already, only 2 minutes in, i really love johnny mnemonic, i watched it as a kid and thought it was awesome and i still think it's awesome. it gets way too bad a rep and really is one of the all time classics of cyberpunk film. guess i'll let you know if i change my mind at the end of this
Johnny Mnemonic is a terrible movie but it's fun and I love it. I just don't compare it to the writing it's loosely based on.
The only way to enjoy it really, I had a lot of fun watching it. I wouldn't watch it again though.
My handle used to be SemioticGhost I completely forgot about it until i heard it in this video!
@sorewahimitsudesu -Gibson said they didn’t use Molly Millions aka Sally Sheers in Johnny Mnemonic because they wanted to keep the franchise’s separate from Neuromancer…
Except she's always been alluded to being the same person. Theres a bunch of clues in neuromancer that match up to scenes from johnny nmonic short story
I believe its mentioned in Neuromancer that Molly had a relationship with a man who is hinted at being Johnny. This relationship occuring before the events of Neuromancer.
So your argument is, johnny nmemonic was a bad movie because it was less feminist than the novel.
What a modern and progressive take you have.
Burning Chrome is a short story collection not a novel.
Who did the artwork? I would like to see more of their work and support the artist. Are they on ArtStation?
I have the same question
is this fanart?
Is using AI generated images cyberpunk or does it make you a corpo gonk who missed the point
this movie is hilariously terrible which i a shame cause everyone is bringing there A game and there was prob a great movie left on the cutting room floor
Oh Yeah, Johnny Mnemonic is easily one of the WORST adaptations in existence, next to Paramount's fraudulent, apocryphal HALO show and David Lynch's art-wank Dune [1984].
At least Johnny Mnemonic had that Takeshi Kitano cameo to carry it.
I'm a big fan of Halo, and that TV show was truly a huge letdown. The series is on its last legs and that did not help.
Okay, I stopped watching -- a minute in -- as soon as you made it clear you have no clue that _Johnny Mnemonic_ is only one short story in the _Burning Chrome_ book, which is the short story the book is named after. This is what happens when you have no clue what you're talking about and use an A.I. script to "generate content".
ego and big hot shot ego heads, ruin too many good universes .
Look at Witcher...that team had the book series, well write and love by many with a huge lore behind, they had also the series of video games also very well done and love by many fans [best live storyboard for a movie].
And with all ready to be just adjusted a little and made in a saga as big as GoT series, and still those morons from Petflix manage to make it garbage, to destroy it....and for what ?
For social activism ? Those target by social activism where not interested by this...and the army of fans of Witcher did not watch it anymore.
I know from beginning that is gonna be a flop, from one small detail...the wolf medallion was bad design and did not matter much in the story [not like in books and in games]
Still a cult classic, though...
I admit that !
@ifelse10110 the parts with Dolph Lundgren were super weird 😅
Preem
Thanks choom.
why do you have to say blade runner 2049 as a success? it cost you a subs
"critique of nuclear family" nothing screams communist as this line lol.
Producers always think they know better than the Director and Writer.....SIGH 🫤
Thinking of the infamous Blade Runner voice-over from the OG theatrical cut lol