Review by Matthew Schuchman
Between 1987 and 1990, Paul Verhoeven helmed two milestones of sci-fi action cinema, that are still tough to rival. The remake of 87′s Robocop is still being finished, but the Total Recall redo is here and fighting for your love. As hard as I try not to compare any new versions of a film to its sources (The 1990 film or the Philip K. Dick short story, We Can Remember it for You Wholesale, the films are based on), it’s proving to be difficult here. The original film did so many things right, where this new glossy version is an atrocity of epic proportions.
After a worldwide nuclear fallout, the only habitable lands on the Earth are Great Britain and Australia. Now known as the United Federation of Britain (UFB), London is the epicenter of the rich, powerful side of the world, run by Chancellor Cohaagen (Bryan Cranston). Australia, now known as The Colony, is where the poor and meek live– it resembles the Shanghai style of Blade Runner, complete with consistent rain. Workers in The Colony travel to the UFB each day via a high speed elevator that runs through the Earth’s core, called The Fall.
Haunted by ominous nightmares, Colony resident Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell), has hit a section of his life, where things just don’t seem to work out. Against the advice of his friend, Quaid visits Rekall, a company that will implant memories of a trip or a different lifestyle into your mind, for a price. Things don’t go the way they are supposed to though, and minutes into his Rekall visit, Quaid is attacked by a highly trained S.W.A.T team–that he kills. What is going on? Is Quaid even Quaid?
So the world is destroyed by radioactive clouds leaving Great Britain and Australia clear of incident. If that is the case, why in the world is everyone American? Yes, Colin Farrell is not American, but he and Bill Nighy certainly are sporting their American accents (Kate Beckinsale loses hers when her cover is dropped). More importantly, wouldn’t there be some disastrously ill effects from drilling through the Earth’s core? These are some fairly large issues and have nothing to do with the fact this is a remake. Call this movie, Where Am I? and imagine the original film never existed–these are just two problems on a laundry list of trouble.
The original Total Recall (besides being a landmark of non-CGI special effects) had a glorious aura of mystery and intrigue around it. Most of its plot was written for the screen, with just the idea of something going wrong at Rekall being the source story. It touched on various political issues, and played to them in an extremely smart and playful way. This new iteration is just fancy action film with obscenely long fight scenes and a morbidly simple, unimaginative plot. More power to someone who wants to change a story and try something new, but hell, THEY DON’T EVEN GO TO MARS!
The script feels like it was written by a child who understood the idea of the story, but none of subtle intricacies of it. As the trailers show, the three breasted woman of the original film makes an appearance, but her existence in the world we are presented makes no sense. The original film contained mutated residence of Mars who were affected by atmosphere leaks in the dome they lived in. This caused this woman to be the only fortunate victim of the leaks. In the new version, there are no mutants, there are no ideas of an ancient alien civilization, everyone is just like us now, with better technology, except one random woman who has three tits. Yeah, maybe she got too close to a mushroom cloud (I’d hate to see her nether regions), but her inclusion is just a sign of someone who cares less about a neat story, and more about sensational muck.
There’s almost no reason to even talk about this film. It creates a ball of anger and pain in the pit of my stomach. A mangled mess of poorly explained situations and hastily thought out scenarios, the new Total Recall is totally pointless, misguided, sloppy, and pathetic. It gets one ‘Stache, simply for having Dylan Smith who played Eddie: The Sleepwalking Cannibal in it, for one minute. If I could, I’d visit Rekall and have the experience of seeing this movie erased from my memory.
Rating: 1 out of 5 ‘Staches
Just some random bitch with three tits. Ha! Amazing. I’ve had that ball of anger about this film ever since I heard it was in the works, which only ballooned when I saw the trailer. I feel bad for you, Mathew, for having the profesisonal integrity to see it for the sake of reviewing it. I will never ever see this film.
You should see it, only so we can bitch about it to each other. If I wanted to go through the whole film and complain about all my issues with it, the review would have been four pages long.
I thought the three breasted woman had intentionally augmented herself as a career choice, which is why she said something along the lines of how you could find whatever you wanted in her whore house.
I would think if that were the case, there would be tons of three breasted chicks, or worse!