I'm an Arnie fan and I like most of the films he's done on one level or another, but if there was one film that made me go "WTF?" as I walked out of the cinema, it was 'Total Recall' (1990). The main reason for my great disappointment back when that version was release dwas due in large part to how cheesy the film looked, but also, the shotgun marriage of the Mars scenario into the second half of the film that had nothing to do with Philip K. Dick's short story.
For quite some time my nickname for that film was 'Total Retard' until somebody pointed out the film could be read as describing the psychosis Doug Quaid falls into after he falls to take the pill from Dr. Edgemar. That is an interesting reading of the film, but I have to force myself to come at that interpretation - it's only a suggestion rather than an explicit plot point.
There are some good things about the 1990 Vorhoeven version with Arnold Schwarzenegger, but it's hard to come at a film that fails to bring Philip K. Dick's vision to the screen and sells it out for cheap laughs and the special effects were pretty ordinary (amazingly it won an Oscar for SFX but it looks terrible today). In most part, the whole movie left me dumbfounded and stupefied by the missed opportunity.
People have been asking why do 'Total Recall' again when it's already been done. I don't know if it counts as having been 'done' when the old version so misses the mark. For me, it's a bit of a pleasant surprise and a joy to watch a version that at least takes the Philip K. Dick story seriously and plays it straight. This is a bit like the Daniel Craig 'Casino Royale' where the Arnie version is more the David Niven & Woody Allen version of 'Casino Royale. You could easily argue that 'Casino Royale' had been 'done'; but could you seriously argue it had been done properly?
What's Good About It
The Special Effects. Good heavens, I can't believe I'm saying this, but this film actually goes so far into the Philip K. Dick universe, it actually fulfills the promise of 'Blade Runner'. I don't say this lightly; but I do mean this wholeheartedly in a year where Ridley Scott has come out with his underwhelming 'Prometheus'. This version of 'Total Recall' completely lifts whole sections of the design of 'Blade Runner' and even Spielberg's 'Minority Report' and completes the vision of how 'all these films should have been - but more about that in a moment.
In the scheme of things where I've watched a lot of Science Fiction movies good and bad, it actually makes me happy to see the promise fulfilled. This film kicks butt and looks good doing it - which is the way it's supposed to be. There's a certain kind of science fiction that appeals to the intellect and intuition and this film does that while providing the pounding action we expect in modern action films.
Kate Beckinsale's still got it; tight pants and all. I know she's the director's wife and she's on the wrong side of 35 for screen goddess terrain, but her Lori Quaid is every bit scary as Sharon Stone's Lori Quaid and if not even more so. I'd be much more scared of Beckinsale's Lori than Sharon Stone's and that's saying something.
What's Bad About It
The bit with the elevator shaft in the middle was too reminiscent of the tunnel way thumping machine sequence in 'Galaxy Quest' and it seriously went a bit too long there. Trap mazes are probably great for the computer game spin off, but they tend to look really contrived and silly.
The music is utterly forgettable. A film like this should have a great score and this score is just not that great. I couldn't hum you the main theme at all, even though I liked the rest of the film.
Also, the cinematography goes a little too flare-happy. Anamorphic lens flare is cool in the back light scenes but there are scenes in this film where the flare goes big when the back light is tiny. It's like the style is almost getting out of hand. It's only a little complaint.
What's Interesting About It
The most interesting thing about this version of 'Total Recall' is how deeply it embraces the other entries in the Philip K. Dick adaptations. the streets of the Colony (a.k.a Australia) are constantly raining like the Los Angeles 2019 of 'Blade Runner' - complete with the flood of Asian characters and writing. The United Federation of Britain is equally reminiscent of the white-on-white designs of 'Minority Report'. I guess some would call this derivative, but I don't see it that way. I see it more as completing the picture that began with 'Blade Runner' many years ago and it has taken until now for the movie business to catch up with the vision.
The best way to understand this film is in fact to see it as the successor to 'Blade Runner'. At one point Colin Farrell is running through a terminal with breaking glass falling everywhere. He holds a gun and sports an overcoat and the scene is most reminiscent of the poster logo for 'Blade Runner' with Deckard in a long coat holding a gun. The film has a feeling of massively layered textual references, all colliding in a furious spectacle - and a lot of the references are coming straight out of 'Blade Runner'.
The Rain
Everybody who does a lift of Blade Runner ends up spending a fortune on the rain machine. I imagine the bill on this one was pretty substantial as well. Why does it rain so much in these movies? It rains because in each instance they're trying to illustrate a broken climate, and thirty years on from 'Blade Runner', it's becoming more and more obvious on a day to day level just how much we have impacted the planet.
The Chinese umbrellas and crowd in the wet rainy streets with neon signs and back lit perspex signs everywhere completes the look. It looks exactly like the street scenes from the Los Angeles 2019 of 'Blade Runner'.
The rain is also a kind of cipher for the opacity of society. The rain actually obscures and nreaks up the image so we don't see everything clearly. The drops reflect the coloured lights without giving them form. The rain visual completes the sense in which the vision is fractured, and this is important because a sense of clarity is the very thing the characters are seeking.
The Flying Car Chase
There is a story recounted in the book about 'Blade Runner' how the test screen audience had come into the cinema with a rumour of a flying car chase. There are flying cars in 'Bade Runner' but they don't do a car chase in the sky. This lack (and the generally sombre mood of the film) led to the test audience hating the original cut. The trope of the flying car chase refused to die, and it makes its appearance in 'The Fifth Element' which also borrows heavily from the Blade Runner look. 'Minority Report' has a flying car chase of sorts but it's actually not been common in science fiction movies as much as you would expect.
There certainly weren't flying car chases in the original 'Total Recall', 'Paycheck' or 'Screamers'. So you take notice when a film cops the Blade Runner style and then proceeds to deliver a pretty hard core flying car chase. Does this make it a good film? I don't know, but it's certainly another instance of Len Wiseman fulfilling the promise of the earlier film.
Artificial Persons
If the original 'Total Recall' struck a pose of weirdness by having mutants, and replicants were the villains in 'Blade Runner', this film certainly covers that terrain by having artificial security force robots who are to supplant the humans.
The distinction between the real and ersatz was a great recurring motif in the work of Philip K. Dick. The collar that allows the holographic disguise and the security robots hark back to the artificial animals and rogue replicants and robots in Dick's oeuvre. You get the feeling Wiseman has spent a good deal of time reading his Philip K. Dick books.
The simulacrum, as the critical language calls it makes a number of appearances in this film. Indeed, the fact that memory is a facsimile of the experience seems to be quite a deep-seated anxiety in this film whereas in the earlier Arnold Schwarzenegger, the simulacrum was merely the bifurcated sense of reality that might arise out of the scene with the pill.
Don't Take The Pill, Kill The Woman!
If ever there was film that wanted to play with the notion of the simulacrum reality, that would have been the original 'Matrix', where Morpheus offers up two pills - one blue, one red - and advises one wipes the memory of the experiences, reverting to the norm by taking the blue pill, or experience the full fracture of the perceived reality by taking the red pill. Of course, that scene harks back to the original 'Total recall' where Dr. Edgemar offers a pill to Arnold Schwarzenegger's Doug Quaid. If Doug takes the pill, then he can go back to a reality where he is no longer the hunted.
This version of the film does not use the pill - most likely because of the ground covered by the Matrix. Instead, it simply sets up the drama to a moment where Doug's 'friend' Harry says he should shoot Melina to accomplish the same renunciation of the fractured reality.
What's interesting about this choice is that the film puts Doug in a position whereby in Freudian terms he has to kill his mother in order to achieve individuation; and in Jungian terms he has to kill his 'anima' in order to experience reality properly. ow, in both schools of thought, what is being asked is counter to what is natural. With Freud, he's supposed to want to fuck his mother, not kill her (unlike, say Norman Bates in 'Psycho') and with Jung, he's supposed to embrace the 'anima' to effectuate his spiritual journey. So when Colin Farrell's Doug Quaid shoots Harry instead, it makes total sense without going into motive.
The Absent Quips
One of the complaints levelled against this film is that it did away with the quips. There were two corker of lines from the earlier version of 'Total Recall' that resonated beyond the film. One was Arnie shooting Sharon Stone's Lori and saying "consider this a divorce." The other was having killed Michael Ironside's Richter, he says "see you at the Party, Richter" as he throws the two arms belonging to Richter that were torn off. They're some of the best moments in an otherwise uneven film.
This film does away with Richter, and the merciless pursuer is the evil 'wife' Lori all the way. It's a good move because the character gets an extended play and what we see of her is a lot more of the Philip-K.-Dick-ian despair at the feminine. What you lose in humour, you get more space for the richness of the Philip K. Dick universe, unadulterated by the tongue-in-cheek of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Indeed, the funniest moment may just be when Jessica Biel's Melina lets out an exasperated, "she's your wife?!"
As a man who got married five times, Philip K.Dick had a catalogue of crazy women in his fiction. One suspects they were all recombined caricatures of his ex-wives. It's quite cool to see that side of the fiction, even if it means it's got fewer jokes.
Quaid, Not Quail
In the original story by Philip K. Dick, the main character's name is Doug Quail. Dick was an interesting writer when it came to his protagonists. He liked recessive characters and ordinary sort of men and women. Hardy anybody is the leading man type in his novels. In the name Quail, you get the feeling that he is both frail and bird-like. He's not supposed to be an action man, let alone the kind of action man to be played by Arnie in his heyday.
In turn, the Vice President of the United States back in 1990 was Dan Quayle, who was known for his many a faux pas. At one point there was a book doing the rounds filled with idiotic quotes from Dan Quayle. All of this probably prompted the renaming of the character to Quaid back then.
It's interesting that the name has stayed Quaid in this iteration. It probably goes to show Dan Quayle is still not that palatable even to this day, while Dennis Quaid is still considered pretty cool dude around Hollywood.
And The Critics Hate It!
I love it when critics hate on a good science fiction film. It just goes to show un-hip they are to what's on screen. this film is so hip for science fiction film, heck, it's a film I wish I made. :)
More seriously, as with other classic Science Fiction movies, the critics who hate it complain that it "doesn't touch (their) heart". They said it about 'Metropolis' in 1927, they said it about '2001: A Space Odyssey' in 1969, and about 'Blade Runner' in 1982 and they're saying it again. It's nice to see how some things never change.
I don't know if a generation of new fans are going to champion this film like Gen X championed 'Blade Runner', but it could happen; and if they did I would not be surprised. In many ways, there's a market starved for seriously cool Science Fiction - and believe you me, this is much more fun than 'Prometheus'.
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