Cyberspace Movies in 1995: Silicon Valley Meets Hollywood
Three Hollywood movies were released in 1995 with internet themes: the Keanu Reeves cyberpunk film Johnny Mnemonic (with an accompanying website), The Net with Sandra Bullock, and Hackers.
At the same time as tools like GeoCities emerged to help people create a home on the web, mainstream culture was beginning to colonize the internet.
Three big budget movies were released in 1995 that had internet themes: the Keanu Reeves flick Johnny Mnemonic in May, The Net with Sandra Bullock in July, and Hackers in September. (Two other 1995 movies had a virtual reality premise: Virtuosity, starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, and Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days.)
The cyberspace movies all reflected the growing importance of the internet in our culture, although reviewers tended to see the computer plots as a gimmick. Roger Ebert’s 3-star review of The Net noted that it “dresses up its plot with a trendy front end, by using the Internet as a hook.” But he praised Bullock’s performance, despite the flimsy story. Ebert also gave Hackers three stars, saying it was “smart and entertaining […] as long as you don't take the computer stuff very seriously.”
Johnny Mnemonic fared the worst in Roger Ebert’s ratings, getting a pitiful 2 stars. Although he liked the “cyber-visuals” in the movie, he said the storyline ultimately let it down — including the initial premise that Keanu Reeves’ character must transport valuable data across the world by downloading it into his brain. Ebert was rather prescient in pointing out the fatal flaw in the plot:
“As a method of data transfer, this stinks. Even today [May 1995], it would be faster, easier and safer to encrypt the data and send it by modem, and by Johnny Mnemonic's time, the world will be wired with fiber optic cables allowing enormous files to be squirted around the world in seconds.”
You can judge for yourself by watching the 1995 trailer:
Interestingly, of the three cyber-films, Johnny Mnemonic was the only one to be set in the future — 2021, twenty-six years on from 1995. Since we’ve all lived through that year now, how did the tropes in the film match up to reality? Brain implants, virtual reality, and AI in human form are all key parts of the plot. None of it is possible in the real world today, at least to the degree that it was conveyed in the film, although there are indeed companies pursuing each of these visions.
William Gibson’s Yardshow
The screenwriter of Johnny Mnemonic was none other than William Gibson, the father of cyberpunk (the movie was based on a 1981 short story of his). But ironically, Gibson wasn’t an early internet user — far from it. In a June 1995 profile, the author told Maclean’s magazine that he had not surfed the Net and was in no hurry to. The article noted that Gibson “uses a relatively ancient Macintosh SC/30 computer—without a modem.”
Although Gibson himself didn’t use the internet, many of his fans and friends did. One of his associates in Vancouver, Christopher Halcrow, created a website for him in mid-1995. Halcrow, who ran a computer repair shop and had recently become an Internet service provider, named the website “The Wonderful World of William Gibson.” By December of that year, according to a later New York Times profile of Gibson, it had been re-titled “William Gibson’s Yardshow.”
Gibson told the Times that the site’s name was “taken from a tradition of Southern American folk art where people, these naïve artists, start building crazy things in their front yards, and they gradually fill their yards.” The yardshow metaphor was also a pretty good description of many GeoCities home pages by the end of 1995, which homesteaders were quickly filling up with pre-made GIFs and images.
Gibson’s Yardshow website no longer exists and there isn’t a working copy in the Internet Archive, but contemporary reviews described it as a collection of esoteric images and links that had little relation to his work as a writer. The website sci-fi.com made it their “site of the week” sometime in 1996, calling it “one of those quirky sites on the Web that is well worth taking a lunch hour to poke through.” It added that there were “a good many ‘coming soon’ pages to wade through, as well as some links that just plain don't work” — again, reminiscent of GeoCities and its ‘under construction’ icons.
Johnny Mnemonic Website
Just before Johnny Mnemonic was released in May 1995, Sony Pictures cross-promoted the movie with a CD-ROM game under the same title and — “because it’s the hip communication medium of the ’90s” — a website at www.mnemonic.sony.com. The website featured a “net.hunt,” an online scavenger hunt that offered $20,000 in prizes. While the site itself is now lost to the sands of time, its creative director Nathan Shedroff later described it on his personal website:
“The two-week long scavenger hunt sent players on a trek across the Net as they sought out the answers to daily clues. The final heat pitted the top 100 players against each other in a timed race through the LA Grid, a high-end rendering of cyberspace filled with puzzles and obstacles.”
There were proto-social-media elements to the Mnemonic website, at least as Shedroff remembered it. He noted “a threaded discussion area for players to meet each other and exchange information and commentary about the contest and the movie,” which was labelled “The Drome” after the bar in the movie. Shedroff said that a “temporary community” formed in the discussion area, where fans “ranted and raved about the game itself, encouraged each other, traded clues and help, scammed and cheated each other, ‘outed’ the scammers and cheaters, and kept up an ongoing dialogue.”
According to Sony, the LA Grid — which was a representation of the movie’s 2021 version of cyberspace — was created using the same 3D graphic database that was used in the movie. The grid consisted of “over 6000 images that were rendered at 600 x 600 and output in both GIF and JPEG formats.”
Cyberculture Classic
It’s a shame the net.hunt website didn’t last the distance, but the movie Johnny Mnemonic has since become a cult classic — despite the poor reviews in 1995 and its director Robert Longo disowning it (for the usual reason: studio interference).
In 2021, the year the story was set, Longo was permitted by Sony to release a black-and-white version of the film. It heightened the noir elements, so that watching it became similar to the experience of watching Fritz Lang’s famous 1927 movie, Metropolis. Perhaps this new version was more satisfactory because the colour version of 1995 had become a little too associated with the early web sites of that era — garish colours and seemingly random juxtapositions of imagery.
In an interview Longo conducted with Gibson and Reeves to accompany the Blu-ray release, Longo asked Gibson whether the cyberspace depicted in the movie looked like what he’d originally envisaged? “Yeah,” he replied in his hesitant, almost shy Virginian drawl, “at that point it looked more like it than anything I'd ever seen.”
For someone who didn’t regularly use the internet in 1995, that may sound like faint praise. But for Gibson, it was never about the technology — he was more concerned with the culture that surrounded it. For years, cyberspace had existed only in his head and in his books; but in 1995, it finally arrived for the rest of society in the form of the early web, along with movie depictions of it.
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