Total Recall

     

    Total Recall is based off of the 1966 short story “We Can Remember it For You Wholesale” by Philip K. Dick. Dick also wrote the stories that inspired the movies Blade Runner and Minority Report. The rights to “We Can Remember it for You Wholesale” were bought by Ronald Shusett in 1974 and he and Dan O’Bannon worked together on a script. It never went anywhere and Dan O’Bannon and Shusett became famous instead for another science fiction story that became the 1979 movie, Alien. Total Recall’s script got shopped around the 80’s and at one point David Cronenberg was set to direct. Being about body horror, he was the one who added the story about the mutants on Mars. By 1987, the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group took over and began development in Australia. They turned down Arnold Schwarzenegger for the role because he didn’t fit the description of the main character. De Laurentiis went bankrupt and Schwarzenenegger jumped at the opportunity. He got Carolco to buy the rights with himself as the star. They would rewrite it to where Quaid was a construction worker rather than an out of shape office worker. Schwarzenegger got Verhoeven to direct after being impressed with his work on Robocop. Verhoeven brought over Ronny Cox and Michael Ironsides, actors he respected. Verhoeven made the movie more of an action satire and finally fixed the issues of how to finish the movie on Mars. He wanted the ending to be more ambiguous. 

Total Recall is about a construction worker named Douglas Quaid who dreams of going to Mars. He sees an advertisement for implanted memories in Rekall. When he arrives, he is sold a secret spy Mars package where he is sold an adventure where he will get the girl that he chose  at the end. The doctors at Rekall add adventures with ancient alien artifacts  and where he will kiss under blue skies on Mars. When they try to add the program, however, they accidentally open up another memory block and it turns out Douglas Quaid was a spy all along. Everything around him was planted, his wife, his friends. He was a spy from Mars who betrayed his allegiance to the dictator Cohaagen for love. Mars agents were after him to try to kill him. Quaid is given a video recording from his former self, Hauser with instructions to go to Mars. There he continues his adventures, frees the mutants of Mars from oppression from Cohaagen, and kisses his dream girl under the blue skies of Mars. So was the entire movie we just saw an implanted memory? 

    Quaid goes to Rekall because of advertising. He is a consumer promised pleasure. He is living a fantasy full of action movie cliches. Is the experience real? Is life just sensations? Most of us are not hedonistic. We don’t want the feeling of being a hero, we want to DO heroic things. We don’t want to plug in and be an instant martial artist. We want to achieve it through our own hard work, or it won’t feel real. We watch Douglas Quaid lose himself in his fantasy, or are we? Even if what we see in the movie is real, it is revealed that Quaid isn’t really Quaid but Hauser, the right hand man of the villain, Cohaagen. Douglas Quaid chooses to live as Quaid and not go back to being Hauser, but he also refuses to be Douglas Quaid, the happily married construction worker. The question is if Quaid is an entirely different person? I think they are all the same person. Even without Rekall our memories are unreliable, and we can choose to be “reborn”, a major aspect of Christianity. 

Rebirth?

    To me, Total Recall is a satire on what the audience wants. We want to escape from our everyday lives and are marketed a grand adventure on the screen. We want to see a violent Schwarzenegger action fantasy and live through him. We want to see him save the planet of Mars and get the girl at the end. We don’t want the red pill back into his real life. We want it to be more thrilling. 

    This movie has some deep philosophical questions about our identity and reality all under the guise of a Schwarzenegger Sci-fi Action Thriller. The movie influenced movies for the next decade as movies would continue to tackle the question of what reality is. It even introduced the concept of taking a red pill to wake up out of a dream. It was an early innovator of CGI and had advanced practical effects. Though it could have been a darker, moody movie more in the style of Blade Runner, it didn’t take itself too seriously. This movie is a science fiction classic and one of the best movies of the 90’s. 5 out of 5