totally rekaled
Posted on 01. May, 2010 by nicole in op-ed
words > DANIEL TILLER
On June 1st, Total Recall turns 20. Loosely based on the novelette “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale,” by Philip K. Dick, this mind trip of a movie shows Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime. Coming off of great 80s movies like Conan, The Terminator, Commando, Predator, and The Running Man, Arnold was in his prime. With the exception of Twins, and the questionable Kindergarten Cop, he could do no wrong.
This movie was made in the day when heroes and villains cussed as much as possible, shot anything that moved, and blew up as much public property as they could find. Total Recall also starred Ronny Cox and Michael Ironside as the villains, with Sharon Stone as Arnold’s wife. One thing to note: in an early scene, Sharon is being “playful” with Arnold in bed when he wakes up from a nightmare, and she supposedly had a problem showing too much in the chest area. Thankfully she lost this modesty in time for the interrogation room scene in Basic Instinct, which was also directed by Paul Verhoeven.
Total Recall pushed the boundaries in special effects; it won the Special Achievement Award for visual effects in 1991 and was nominated for two Oscars that same year. I recently watched this movie again and I’m happy to say that the effects actually hold up. It was one of the last movies to use mostly miniatures, dummies, and other techniques over CGI. There were only two scenes that took me out of the movie for a second.
More than just action, this movie is a mind twist. The whole premise is about a man who dreams of being with a girl on Mars and that he dies on its surface. Because of this dream, he decides to visit the red planet. Although after he sees a commercial for Rekal, Incorporated, a company that will implant memories of him going there, he decides to do that instead. The company says it’s a safer and cheaper alternative. Once he gets there they talk him into the upgrade. This upgrade enables him to visit Mars as a Secret Agent, whose contact, briefly shown on a monitor, just happens to look exactly like the woman of his dreams.
Of course all doesn’t go as planned; when he gets implanted he freaks out, claiming to be someone else – you guessed it, a secret agent. So he escapes, goes to Mars anyways, meets the girl, and blows up a lot of stuff. One of the trippiest parts of the movie doesn’t even seem that trippy at first glance. In the middle of the movie, while on Mars, Arnold is visited by a Dr. Edgemar, who tells him that he is still hooked up to the machine on Earth and that if Arnold kills him the walls of reality will come crashing down, resulting in his lobotomy. Before Arnold kills him, because Arnold sees him sweat, he gives a play-by-play of the rest of the movie. At the end of the movie it fades to white, leaving it open for the viewers to make up their own mind about what really happened.
I can make arguments either way, but I do know that I learned something from this movie: three breasts are better than two.
