Total Recall

So I went to this place called "Rekall" to get some good ol' fake memories about a fictional adventure, and I tend to forget how great this movie is.

Arnold tried to make this movie for about ten years before putting it in the hands of Paul Verhoeven, relatively fresh off of his last sci-fi epic RoboCop. It's a match made in heaven. Trivia states that Arnold was an option to play RoboCop, but due to his sheer size, that wouldn't have been the best mash-up. Total Recall is a better fit for him as a regular guy named Douglas Quaid who has a good life. His wife is hot and he's got walls made out of TVs in his home, but that's not enough. He dreams about Mars. A lot. So much so that he needs to fake a vacation there, but he'll also be faking a vacation from himself. Or is he?

This movie has a lot of cool things going for it. It's set in 2084 with space travel, Mars colonies, mutants, psychics, sluts, and in a typical Verhoeven fashion, it's violent as hell. I love the bystander on the escalator being used as a human shield and getting shot like fifty times.

The sci-fi aspects are among my favorite of any science fiction movie. The look of Mars is great, the weird futuristic tech and robotics are always fun to watch, and the outdated practicality is fun to ponder about. Like the cars for example. They're very bulky and square, and this is supposed to be future-tech? Kind of the opposite direction if you ask me. And when he opens the briefcase to get instructions about removing the bug in his head, that laptop-esque device is huge. And so is the bug in his nose. Stuff will be so much smaller in 2084.

I watched an interview with Arnold on a restrospect of his career, and when he gets to Total Recall, he mentions how it was remade and deemed it stupid. Arnold doesn't bullshit, but when he does, it's very funny. I watched this movie with commentary once, and when the Tristar horse logo rolls in the credits, Arnold blatantly claims that it's him. I died laughing when I heard that.

It's a great fuckin' movie. There are noticable goofs at time, but like old Dean Lerner says, "If you're looking at the wires... you're a freak." Some of those goofs add to the charm in an era where people didn't give as much of a fuck.


Specific goofs I'm referring to: when he takes off the fat lady's robotic head, the mechanisms go deep into the center of the piece. Cut to... Arnold's head fills out the head unit almost entirely. The mechanism would be going through his head, but it doesn't.

The next big goof is when the men surround Quaid's holograph and shoot through it, the bullets don't pass through it to kill any of them. What gives?


And on a final note, Kuato on the guy's chest always reminded me of melted Chucky from Child's Play 2.