Post-modern Hegemony

Rating: 7/10 (23 November 2007)

Total Recall recounts a dystopian future in which a common man has the choice to lead his own destiny or become a pawn for an interplanetary mega-corporation. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Hauser, a man who is working for an extra-terrestrial mining company which maintains a monopoly on air needed by the population living and working on their main mining base on Mars. The company has employed Hauser in a hunt to find Kuato, the leader of a rebellion against the company. In his search for the rebel leader, Hauser switches sides and begins to help the rebellion. When this happens, the company's lead Mars administrator, Vilos Cohaagen, captures Hauser and uses "Rekall" brand technology to erase and re-programs his memory. In doing so, Cohaagen seeks to eliminate Hauser from further aiding the rebels, and possibly gain an advantage - should Hauser become aware of his former memories and trace his way back to Kuato.
The film begins in a dream turned nightmare in which Schwarzenegger and his former female companion on Mars, Melina (Rachel Ticotin), have an accident while exploring Martian terrain. Awaking from this nightmare, Schwarzenegger is now Douglas Quaid, (an identity created by Cohaagen's Rekall technicians), now living on Earth with a house, a construction job, and Lori: his hot blonde wife (Sharon Stone). Things seem hunky-dory for Quaid until he begins piecing together clues leading to his former life on Mars as Hauser.
Paul Verhoeven's direction of a script influenced by Philip K. Dick's sci-fi short story is both visually exciting and challenging. In 1990, the producers found this match to be demanding enough to break previous film budget production records. The budget was well spent on creating the film's appearance of new architectural brutalism, future technologies, and on costuming and special effects. The portrayal of the mutant Martian population added a grotesque flourish to the already action-packed science-fantasy.
Total Recall is less a classic film for the ages than it is indicative of cutting-edge modernism of the late 80s and early 90s. The main philosophical components deal with meta-cognition (thinking about thought), reality, dream states, control, and flexibility vs. conservatism. It also speaks to concerns about new technology and the old fear of its use by the wrong people. The final sequence boils down to a fight between the corporation and rebels as a conflict over whether the Martian population will be able to "breathe free" or only with the consent of and payment to the company.
But the conflict seems to conceal another issue, that being the unfettered expansion humans beyond Earth. This encapsulates post-modern hegemony; both the rebel's trust in alien technology to safely deliver a fresh breath of air (who can really complain if a few windows are broken in the process) and the corporation's conservative stance to restrict the atmosphere are risks to the human condition and neither can be acted upon with the total participation of all those effected. In summation, the creation of a Martian atmosphere is a triumph over the corporation for the moment, but in the long run how will this prevent Mars from being overrun by the very same corporations which were defeated in the film's finale. The answer to this may lay in the film which was developed as a sequel to Total Recall, Minority Report (2002), which saw psychic-clairvoyant Martian mutants employed to help detect and fight crime before it even took place, a film which did not continue the trajectory of Hauser and Melina. Even though Hauser was able to set the Martian atmosphere free, it seems the possibilities for continuing his adventure had been exhausted.