Exciting, Violent, Mind-Twisting Martian Espionage Science-Fiction Action Thriller

Rating: 7/10 (26 April 2007)

Doug Quaid is having vivid dreams about Mars. He goes to Rekall, a company that sells fake memory implants, but has a psychotic reaction to the treatment. Suddenly, he is being attacked and assisted on all sides by secret-agents, his wife turns out to be an imposter and he seems to hold the key to some great secret buried in an ancient Martian mine. Is he really a spy, or is he suffering from a massive paranoid fantasy delusion ?
Reportedly the most expensive film ever made at the time, Total Recall is a mind-bending, bone-crunching action thriller set in some vague future, with a great script by Dan O'Bannon and producer Ronald Shusett. In some ways it's a formulaic picture, with the predictable car-chases, fights and impossible escapes every ten minutes, but in others it's a wildly disorienting alternate reality, as Doug is forced to question his own existence. In one of the best scenes, the villains attempt (and almost succeed) to convince Doug he's living in an elaborate hallucination, before resorting to more traditional methods. Even the familiar elements are terrific, due to the futuristic setting (infuriating computerised minicabs, a tricky hologram, a fabulous Martian colony base) and Rob Bottin's gleefully twisted comic-book mutations, which include a fake head within another fake head and a pivotal character who lives in the stomach of another. Big Arnie does his usual likable bluster in the lead, but the best performances are the husband and wife of Stone as a sharp-suited villainess and Ironside as an implacable but uninformed henchman, with Cox managing to be even more vicious than he was in Verhoeven's preceding Robocop. Also noteworthy are Eric Brevig's marvellous visual effects, with some pioneering digital work (the nail-painter, the swooping shots through the huge secret generator), and a top-notch rousing score by Jerry Goldsmith that blasts everything along with booming brass and cracking percussion. Following the success of The Terminator, Schwarzenegger made six big-budget science-fiction films, all of which are good but none of which are quite as good, but this one is topper excessive entertainment and probably the best of the runners-up. Based on the short story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, by the highly influential science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick.