One of Verhoeven's best movies, no doubt.

Rating: 9/10 (14 May 1999)

Arnie is Doug Quaid, a simple construction worker who is bored with his uneventful life and wishes to be more and to do something meaningful. He's fascinated with going to Mars and meeting the mysterious woman of his dreams (that would be Melina) despite the civil war brewing withing the colonies. His wife Lori (Sharon Stone, looking gorgeous) is appalled with all things Martian and quickly nixes that idea. The only way Quaid is going to come close to the red planet is if he takes a Rekall vacation, a company that literally offers you a 'dream' vacation memory implant. Quaid wishes to go as a secret agent and all seems well until they send him to sleep.
As soon as he's unconscious Quaid seems to wake up in a rage, claiming his name is not Quaid but Hauser. And it's not just the dream going wrong since the Rekall technicians have not even implanted the dream yet. Blacking out again and waking up in a cab, Quaid has totally no recollection of anything that has happened and is confused to find his life turned upside down. His wife and colleagues are trying to kill him, dozens of armed henchmen are after him, he seems to have acquired lethal killing skills from nowhere and he apparently has some unfinished business back on Mars, despite the fact that he's never been there. Or has he?
Once on Mars for real (or is it?) he finds himself involved with the beautiful Melina (Rachel Ticotin, even prettier than Sharon Stone), the underground resistance and battling their arch-nemesis Vilos Cohaagen, a bureaucrat who has the entire planet under his control. It seems that Hauser was Cohaagen's right hand man and left clues for the fabricated Quaid persona to topple Cohaagen's regime.
Total Recall is certainly one of Arnie's and Verhoeven's most imaginative and creative movies. The Mars town of Venusville is basically Amsterdam's Red Light District with booze, drugs and sex everywhere, the violence is so ridiculously over-the-top that one cannot help but laugh at it (despite a lot of the gorier bits being censored by the evil MPAA), the vision of the future is incongruously bleak but colorful and fanciful yet primitive. The contrasts between Earth and Mars are similar to Western and Third World comparisons.
The visual effects, if slightly dated, are simply amazing. Jerry Goldsmith's awesome score is, at once, atmospheric and action-packed. The set-pieces, especially Quaids vision of the alien furnaces, are just ludicrously entertaining and the 'is it a dream or is it real' premise puts such a wonderfully surreal twist on the whole thing. Sci-Fi has never been so outrageous. What do you expect with mad genius Dutchman directing? And I do believe that it IS real.