I watched “Johnny Mnemonic”, again over the weekend. I had forgotten that Gibson had the screen writing credit. Johnny is a short story, published most recently in “Burning Chrome” and gets three paragraphs in “Neuromancer”, the first of his “Sprawl” trilogy; in the film the book’s Molly becomes Jane, played by Dina Meyer, who doesn’t do it for me although to my mind it’s mainly the writing. Molly Millions is hard core, street samurai. The film is also more broadly inspired than just the short story, borrowing a number of ideas from Gibson’s Virtual Lights trilogy. It’s almost as if Gibson didn’t expect to get another chance on film.
Johnny Mnemonic