Construction worker Douglas Quaid's obsession with the planet Mars leads him to visit Recall, a company that manufactures memories. When his memory implant goes wrong, Doug can no longer be sure what is and isn't reality.
Intrinsically Verhoeven, Total Recall is a film from my youth that I probably shouldn't have been watching quite as early as I did, but that I still love to this day. All the practical effects, exquisite violence & nudity and provocative sci-fi themes you've come to expect from this sort of thing, but twists and turns that start just five minutes in and keep running all the way through to the end. Total Recall is a must-see.
Final rating: - Very strong appeal. A personal favourite.
Verhoeven bonkers adaptation of a P. K. Dick story.
Doug Quaid keeps getting recurring dreams about a visit to Mars. In spite of his friends warnings, he decides to have a memory implanted Mars holiday. But during the implantation he remembers being a secret agent who is fighting evil Mars boss Vilos Cohaagen. Things are about to go very intergalactic bonkers indeed.
Total Recall finds director Paul Verhoeven on particularly OTT form, with the often maligned director cranking up the action and violence to the max. So then, who better to play out the carnage than the big Austrian oak himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger? It was actually Schwarzenegger who brought Verhoeven into the picture. The idea for the film had been kicking around for ...
Aside from maybe "Predator" (1987) this is probably my favourite outing from Arnold Schwarzenegger. He ("Quaid") goes off to have an harmless implant of memories from an holiday on Mars (that he hasn't had) only to find that his life starts to unwind very quickly afterwards. Even his girlfriend "Lori" (Sharon Stone) becomes a would-be assassin and he is soon under attack from just about every other quarter too. Why? Well, that's what we now explore as he decides that he - helped by a video iteration of himself - must travel back to the red planet and get to the bottom of things. My flaw - well Ronny Cox is just dreadful as "Cohaagen" which does prove important towards the end of the film, but for the main part it is an action packed and wel...
Man, it's almost like Saw with it's torture-porn thing... only the over-the-top gore actually fits beautifully into the story in the most entertaining way possible, even when it is so 80s cheese that it's almost comical.
But the ultra-violence is part of the fun of these types of films. It's part of the reason why people love them... and it's over-the-top in a way that can't really be done today.
It's also pretty stylistic and fun and that brings you into the world that the story is trying to create, while at the same time it leaves the viewer thinking that they are watching one heck of a mystery. Like Blade Runner, if you wanted to, you could walk away thinking that it's all an illusion, that what you thought was real was fake... if ...