Review of Total Recall (1990) by Steve A — 27 Jul 2012

This is a fun movie that's both a decent sci-fi story and a really good Arnold Schwarzenegger movie (which is pretty much its own genre, isn't it?). What more do I really need to say?

The story, adapted from a Philip K. Dick story (his work also inspired Blade Runner, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, and other films), follows a man named Doug Quaid (Ah-nuld) who decides to visit an agency called ReKall that offers to implant you with the memory of a vacation to a different planet (so that it's like you went on vacation, even though you actually didn't). Suddenly during the procedure, however, he thinks he is a secret agent and has to go to Mars. From there, a big plot unfolds on Mars involving violent conflict between a local tycoon who controls the air supply and rebels who oppose him (and seem mostly to be mutants). But is all this real? Or is it a dream? Is it a real memory? A fake one?

The movie impressively manages to balance fairly sophisticated questions about the nature of its own reality with lots of scenes of Schwarzenegger massacring bad guys and following up with ironic one-liners. There is a certain charm to his performance here, and of course he's a good action hero, as always. The movie is full of action, much more graphically violent than many of today's watered-down PG-13 blockbusters, and has a number of impressive (for 1990) special effects. It also throws in some memorable sights that don't especially need to be there, such as the hooker with three breasts or the man with a smaller man living on his stomach. I guess the only things about the movie that didn't really satisfy me were 1) that the bad guys (played by Ronny Cox and Michael Ironside) were kind of stock and uninteresting and 2) that the story never resolves, or even gives a real hint about, the issue of whether or not it's all real. Other than that, it's a solid, enjoyable movie.