why must action movies require a mindcheck at the door?

Rating: 7/10 (1 February 1999)

I saw Total Recall while I was in high school and since a friend of mine owns it and was talking about it the other day I thought I'd check it out again. I love Dick's novels and for that reason alone thought this would be worth watching. So sadly wrong. It was evident that the original idea was a good one, but a whole lot of garbage had been tacked on to make this into a Hollywood scifi bomb.
I do not understand why some fans of science fiction and action movies think it necessary to have their intelligence insulted in order for a film to be enjoyable. Action and intelligence, sorry to say, are not mutually exclusive. The plot was by no means as complex as I remember it being, and Mars seemed even more contrived than in my first viewing.
Very simple plot points could have been corrected to make Total Recall a bit more respectable. The most glaring: why is that the vague "aliens" who built the reactor made the indentation in the panel which starts it up in the shape of a human hand? Puhleaze.