Superior Script Helps Solid Sci-Fi Actioner

Rating: 8/10 (29 January 2003)

Arnold Schwarzenegger's best film to date is a solid sci-fi actioner mixing a superior script with a good cast, some impressive special effects, and one of Jerry Goldsmith's most rip-roaring scores ever.
Based on a Philip K. Dick short story, the film is about Douglas Quaid, a construction worker in late-21st century America who has a curious passion for the planet Mars, now colonized and tyrannized by corporate dictator Vilos Cohaagen. His passion has led to several violent nightmares that alarm his wife Lori, and eventually leads him to Rekall, a company that implants fake "memories" of exciting vacations in the brains of curious clients. But implanting a fake memory of a trip to Mars unlocks something else in Quaid, and suddenly this lowly construction worker is pursued by his worker friends, his wife, and a deranged assassin named Richter.

Making things more confusing, Quaid is contacted by a "buddy" from Mars he doesn't remember and given a suitcase containing a vast compilation of Martian money, weird tools, a hologram projection wristwatch, and a video message machine from.......himself!
Quaid is really Douglas Hauser, an assassin for Cohaagen who has fallen in love with a Martian guerrilla leader (Rachel Ticotin) and who has had his entire life "erased" by Cohaagen. The answers to Quaid's questions lie on Mars, but as he is pursued by Richter, Quaid finds out even more about Mars, including the secret to the planet's pyramid mines - a secret Cohaagen can't afford to let out.
But Quaid is double-crossed, and by the most unlikely person imaginable, leading to a brutal slaughter of the Martian resistance and reimplantation for Quaid.
The film's excitement comes from its seemingly endless action scenes. If anything, there are a few too many action scenes and a bit too much gore - the riot in Venusville, the famed spaceport gunfight and oxygen hurricane, and a battle of underground drills within the surface of Mars are scenes that could and should have been left out and replaced by more character interplay. Also excessive is the film's gore, particularly in the portrayal of the mysterious Kuato, who should have been portrayed as an alien being in the form of Land Of The Lost's Enik.