Directed by: Paul Verhoeven
Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rachel Ticotin, Michael Ironside, Sharon Stone, Ronny Cox
Arnold Schwarzenegger is among the most distinct actors in movie history. His size, accent, and sense of humor give him dimension, and he has carried movies with some of the wackiest plots in many a moon. He loves what he does, and it shows, especially in Total Recall, in which Arnold plays a seemingly ordinary man caught up in an interplanetary scheme. In this futuristic movie, Mars is colonized, although under the thumb of industrialist Cohagen (Cox), who controls the planet's oxygen supply. Schwarzenegger is Doug Quaid, who lives high on the hog on Earth as a construction worker with a beautiful wife (Stone). But, Quaid is haunted by memories of Mars, even though he has supposedly never set foot on the red planet.
Quaid signs up for a virtual memory implant in which he is in control of his own fantasy adventure on Mars. But the fantasy he installs clashes with the ones already in there, which sends Quaid on a mission to Mars to find out exactly who he is and what role he plays in all of this. Oh, and he's being chased by Cohagen's stooges, so whatever is going on here is not ordinary. I won't reveal any more,
except to say what's done here is done well. Schwarzenegger is a sympathetic hero trapped in something he can't fully understand, and even when it's explained, he still can't quite believe it.
We probably can't either, but we go along with it because Total Recall is nothing if not goofy and entertaining.
The vision of Mars reminds me of the cantina in Star Wars where creative aliens pop up, including one with three breasts and another in which a tiny creature erupts from another's stomach a la Alien.
The makers of Total Recall are optimistic about humankind's ability to build another civilization on another planet. After all, has anyone witnessed how long it takes a construction crew to fix a road here on Earth?
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