One of Schwartzenneger's Best

Rating: 7/10 (10 July 2007)

When I first saw it in the theater I was 15 years old and I thought it was one of the best movies I ever saw. It was some fun to come back to it 15 years later. At this point I can see that there's a lot of humor in there, whereas as a younger person I took it very seriously. Verhoeven is a very good director, and this is one of his better films -- he is able to give us a film that is complex but at the same time not obtrusively so. You can kind of take and leave what you want from Verhoeven's glossy satire. Schwarzenneger's performance is one of his best, one of the only times he played an actual human being with anything like believability. A lot of times his physical mass prevents him from passing as "normal", but here his stature just adds to the sense that something is wrong in the first place with him being this peaceful construction worker, and adds some irony to the fact that this man is made so helpless by the mental tinkerers at "Total Rekall", a place where you can buy the memory of a vacation if you don't have time to take an actual trip.
The violence is so extreme that it's at times sickening, but I just find it all humorous because I don't really take the movie all that seriously. A lot of people laugh when they hear that Phil Dick wrote the source story, but this film actually sticks a lot closer to its source material than "Blade Runner" or "Minority Report" or any of the other more "respected" Dick adaptions that I've seen. It's worth pointing out that while the moments of extreme violence in Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner" sometimes feel like arbitrary concessions to the action movie audience and don't feel fully integrated into the film's somber tone, Verhoeven's film is consistently giddy, turbulent, and fast, making the violence seem more natural to his film's glossy aesthetic.
I think Ron Cox did some good work here but basically Michael Ironside stole the show as far as villains go. He's the definition of a "loose cannon", so jealous of Quaid's (Schwarzenneger) connection with his gal Lori (Sharon Stone, appropriately feral) that he becomes a figure who's both sympathetic and terrifying. Rachel Ticotin is merely serviceable, rather underwhelming considering she's given a meaty role for the love interest in an action film.
Special notice should go to the great Rob Bottin and his company for some of his most impressive animatronic work  which is saying a lot. Maybe the effects are a bit aged now, but they are quality effects, and I predict that they will stand the test of time better than most computer generated effects films. This was one of the last big effects films to use only actual photographic elements for all its shots. It features an impressive matte/miniature shot that takes us from the inside of a train to the Martian landscape and ultimately soaring above Mars' domed cities  a shot that is very close to one that was planned for the beginning of "Blade Runner" but abandoned for financial reasons.
As a Phil Dick adaption, it's an interesting case because even though as stated above the film sticks somewhat closer to Dick's original than most adaptions have done ("Minority Report" deserves particular shame for introducing the exploitative element of the deceased child), it is also the furthest in tone and feeling from Dick's work in some ways. It captures his paranoia about identity and memory control with great accuracy. Simply for communicating such a complex idea  that a person's identity could actually be changed by artificial intelligence technology  to the popcorn-munching millions (like my own former 15-year-old self). And in the end we have a film that is essentially a top-notch action film that's crossed over into "The Twilight Zone". Schwartzenneger, whose 2 other best films IMHO were the similarly sci-fi flavored "Terminator" and "Predator", must have known this, as he reportedly took a personal interest in the project before production began. He put his heart in the film in a way he never had before and never did again. For his part, Verhoeven returned to a similar turf in "Starship Troopers", which was also a fun movie but perhaps not quite as much fun as this one or "Robocop". So this is also a career peak for him as well.