DAC Episode 311 - The Random Canon #39 - Johnny Mnemonic in Black and White (1995/2021)

tfw you’re about to hitch a ride on the information superhighway.

In the spring of 1995, Johnny Mnemonic was released on an unready world as a would-be blockbuster. Instead, what the public got was a B-movie with arthouse sensibilities buried under beams of neon and plumes of fog. In 2021, director Robert Longo released a black and white cut of the film, unchanged except for a careful colour grading that turned its clanky ‘90s aesthetic into an alternate future noir. What other movie features a cybernetically enhanced dolphin and Dolph Lundgren as a deranged assassin-monk? No other movie but Johnny Mnemonic. In black and white.