A Classic 1990s Action Pic, Perfect To Watch Stoned

Rating: 8/10 (28 October 2008)

By now, Total Recall is one of those classic action flicks we've seen a million times on TV, but we overlook Arnold Schwarzenegger's performance, judging it as nothing more than action hero presence and not really acting. But Ahnuld is one of the reasons the movie works. He isn't a hulking superman, although he incidentally fights like one. He's a baffled and alarmed guy, deceived by the edifice of reality. And in his susceptibility, he opens the way for this hilarious and ultraviolent Philip K. Dick adaptation to be more than simply a violence and special effects run-around, although the latter half conforms to such.
There are loads of action and violence in Total Recall, which frankly would be the perfect movie to watch stoned, and practically every frame appears to inhabit one or more special effects. This is one of the most multifaceted and visually attention-grabbing sci-fi movies even still, in spite of how heavily dated it is now. What would happen to one's mental purity of essence if it were possible to be equipped with memories? If your whole past could be plugged into your brain, taking the place of the experiences through which you had really lived, up till that very moment unashamed for having treasured the things akin to those lacks and wants that caused you to do the things you have done? That's what looks as if to happen to Quaid, the Schwarzenegger character in Total Recall, which should have kept Dick's original title, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, while periodically neither Quaid nor we can be certain. As he did with RoboCop, Paul Verhoeven creates a desensitized and cynical future, where Quaid lives with his curvy blonde Sharon Stone wife, and works in construction. His life gives a pleasant impression, but he keeps having these violent dreams about Mars that ultimately move him to sign up with a controversial travel agency that endows you with the memory of the perfect vacation as opposed to all the work of achieving a perfect real one.
But is this a packaged memory, or a real experience? The movie plays tantalizing mind games with the likelihood, pivotally in a great scene where a doctor and Quaid's Sharon Stone seem to appear out of thin air to convince him of one of the possibilities. Mars is in the middle of a revolutionary war between the forces of a greedy, power-drunk captain of industry, played with great comic book-style verve by Ronny Cox just as he did in Verhoeven's RoboCop, and a group of rebels. There is a mystery involving a huge reactor that was ostensibly assembled by aliens on Mars a million years ago, and has been discovered during mining operations. And can the sexy Rachel Ticotin trust Quaid, who doesn't know that they were lovers some time ago? Total Recall moves from side to side among different translations and planes of reality, whereas all at once filling to the brim with fertile details of a messed up future.
I am baffled by the thought that in the future, firearms of all kinds would not be outlawed inside an airtight glass shell like the one in which Earthlings must remain on Mars. There are to be sure quite a lot of moments in which people are sucked outside when the air seal is shattered, but that doesn't stop the movie's villains from never hitting their target, or for that matter the good guys from ever missing theirs.
But one can argue that the gaping inconsistencies in this quintessentially 1990s Schwarzenegger picture are on purpose, because the science depicted is laughable all the way through, and right from the start. At many points in the movie, characters wind up outside on Mars, and right away begin to inflate, their eyes popping and their faces ballooning. This is just an example. And from a good deal of what I have seen of Verhoeven's work, such as The Fourth Man, RoboCop and Starship Troopers, he knew how silly this was, and cynically satirized the action adventure tradition's cavalier approach to realism, mortality and violence, which frankly is preferable over an action picture with these approaches that takes itself seriously.