One dumb movie (spoilers)

Rating: Null/10 (25 September 2002)

I don't know why people think "Was it a dream?" is such a clever idea. The archetypical "And then she woke up" story is "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (1865), and the archetypical "Am I dreaming him or is he dreaming me" story is its sequel, "Through the Looking-Glass" (1871).
It's-all-a-dream certainly explains why there are so many dumb ideas in Total Recall:
* pulling a homing device out of your nose and then leaving it lying around while the enemy are closing on you
* Arnie's female disguise going wrong and everybody just standing there, then it not just working perfectly again but making an Arnie-like wisecrack before exploding
* someone looking like Arnie able to walk around Mars unrecognised
* a brothel with no privacy
* machine guns with unlimited supplies of ammo
* machine guns as the only weapons in a glass-walled environment on a low-air-pressure planet
* towns with no division between streets and footpaths, so pedestrians are always having to scatter
* a battle with machine guns in a place of concrete cylinders, and never a ricochet
* a hologram that can deceive people suddenly appearing out of nowhere, the only setup for it being a tennis-coaching hologram that is so unrealistic it glows
* a lift with three open sides going up many storeys
* a device that will terraform Mars left unguarded for 500,000 years, started by a big button that nobody has ever pushed
I'm sure there are heaps more.