TOTAL RECALL
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1990 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Violence, chases, thoughtful plotting, special effects, gore, Arnold Schwarzenegger, a few intelligent ideas. They don't all seem as if they could be in one film. Nobody will be totally happy with TOTAL RECALL, but there is a surprising degree of good science fiction in what could be Arnold Schwarzenegger's most intelligent fantasy film to date. Rating: +2.
I have to say that I usually am not very impressed by action or violence in films. How much variation is there in chase scenes from one film to the next? To my mind there is almost none other than the background scenery changing. The same goes for violence. There are about as many ways to tear apart a human as there are to carve a turkey. It is a special effect that has been done so many times in film that it no longer is of any interest to me to see it. I am well aware that there are people who can enjoy chases and violence in film after film and enjoy them every time, just as there are people who listen to the "Top 40" radio stations and can enjoy hearing the same songs over and over. Chase scenes and violence to me seem like unimaginative filler. In addition and amazingly, I find I have this weird psychic ability to know at the beginning of a fight scene who is going to win the fight. If there are four armed thugs taking on an unarmed Arnold Schwarzenegger, psychic vibrations tell me at the beginning of the fight who is going to win. The vibrations work for chase scenes also and there, too, they remove much of the suspense.
There have been a number of films that have tried to marry action to a science fiction plot. They have been films such as THE TERMINATOR, PREDATOR, THEY LIVE, and ROBOCOP. I consistently like them less than the general public does and it is more than likely because the action and violence scenes have so little value for me. What I think I am really rating is the science fiction film that frames the action and violence-- often making for a much shorter film. Take the action and violence from the four films I mentioned and none is a particularly good science fiction film. Only THEY LIVE has a particularly engaging premise. That may be because THEY LIVE is an adaptation of a pre-existing, published science fiction story so to some extent the story has stood on its own. TOTAL RECALL is a new action film also based on an existing science fiction story and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
An Arnold Schwarzenegger action film based on a story by Philip K. Dick sounds almost like a contradiction in terms. Dick writes cerebral--not to say neurotic--science fiction about people who generally seem to live inside their heads. You could not fit Schwarzenegger into a Dick story with a crowbar. The main character of Dick's "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" is a mousy, hen-pecked government clerk. Changes were inevitable if the story was to be made into an action vehicle and vast changes were indeed made. Yet the screenplay has retained much of the plot and most of the engaging ideas of the story before going off in its own direction. Even when it does diverge, some of the concepts it adds are thoughtful and intelligent. Of course, some unfortunately are not. I know of nobody who actually liked the last ten minutes or so of the film. Like many films, TOTAL RECALL was damaged by somebody's idea of a big finish.
This is a story with a lot of twists, particularly early on when it is still being faithful to the original story. This means that I cannot be very informative about the plot, but I can say that it starts out being about a sort of an average 21st century man with big muscles and an unusual problem. He keeps dreaming about Mars. There is nothing in life Doug Quaid wants more than to go to Mars. (In the story his name was Doug Quail, but it was changed, possibly because it sounded too much like Dan Quayle.) Unfortunately, only relatively few people can go to the mining colonies on Mars and Quaid is not one. Well, the next best thing to being there is having *been* there. The difference between having been there and not is having the memories. In this future world a company called REKALL can put artificial memories into your head more vivid and believable than real memories. So Quaid agrees to buy an artificial memory of Mars--just a minor adjustment to his reality. But any Philip K. Dick fan can tell you things go awry when you start adjusting reality. They certainly do for Quaid. The script is a remarkable piece of work that allows the viewer to look at the altering of reality to be a minor plot complication in an action film or it could be what the film is all about. My wife came up with reasonable internal evidence that the surface interpretation of what happens in the film is wrong and another interpretation of the reality is correct. Clearly the script is richer than one usually expects from a Schwarzenegger action chase film.
Visually there are some very unconvincing effects and some very nice ones. Some of the model work is below average for Industrial Light & Magic and Dream Quest, but there are some very impressive sights also. Audiences seem to enjoy the subway security station as an effect different from what ILM and DQ have done in the past. the special effects have been described as "eye-popping," a pun that will be appreciated in the first five minutes of the film but also an accurate one. That brings us to the gore. This film is directed by Dutchman Paul Verhoeven. He is generally good but uses a very great deal of gore and violence, particularly in his later films. This is a very violent film and viewers should go expecting that. Also go expecting to see a lot of familiar brand names that helped to finance the film. (Of course, Dick mentions a typewriter company by name in the original story, so there are precedents.)
In summary, TOTAL RECALL is a lot of different films. It should please pretty much anyone who likes science fiction films. It should have a broad range of appeal on many levels. I rate it a +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
[The novelette "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" can be found in the following magazines, collections, and anthologies: - MAGAZINE OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION, April 1966 - MAGAZINE OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION, 30th Anniversary Issue - THE PRESERVING MACHINE by Philip K. Dick - ALPHA 5 edited by Robert Silverberg - THE BEST FROM FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION 16 edited by Edward L. Ferman - EARTH IN TRANSIT edited by Sheila Schwartz - NEBULA AWARD STORIES 2 edited by Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison - THE ROAD TO SCIENCE FICTION, edited by James E. Gunn - TWENTY YEARS OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION edited by Edward L. Ferman and Robert P. Mills - WORLD'S BEST SCIENCE FICTION: 1967 edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr]
Mark R. Leeper
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