A tragic footnote must be included with any science fiction film.
It should read: "The man who most likely influenced — or outright wrote —
the story you are about to watch never saw his science fiction become science
non-fiction."
Renowned sci-fi author Philip K. Dick was around for the moon
landing and the early stages of the home computer, but he missed the wireless
phone, the internet, the mapping of the human genome. And then, on the cusp of serious
advancement in the fields of science and technology in the early ’80s, Dick
died, within four months of the release of the first film adaptation of one his
works, Blade Runner (book title: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep?).
What does all this have to do with Total Recall? Not much, other than the obvious: Dick wrote the
story it was based on, though he called it We
Can Remember It For You Wholesale. I think he'd get a chuckle at all the
CGI involved in a movie like Total Recall:
"So a computer made this movie then?" he'd ask wryly. "That
would make a great story."
Doug Quaid (Colin Farrell) is a factory worker in a future Britain . Every
day he makes a 17-minute commute from Australia through the middle of the
planet. As the giant elevator car passes through the molten core, gravity reverses and
the elevator's downward momentum is turned into upward propulsion. Outside the
windows it looks very hot and bubbly. And you thought your morning commute was
bad.
Quaid is bored with his life, but with a wife like Lori (Kate
Beckinsale), who slinks around in various underthings, you'd think he would be
happier — "I give good wife," she tells her husband. One day after work he goes into Rekall, a company that will implant
memories into his head, because if the memory is real enough it feels like it
actually happened even if it didn't. Quaid asks for the spy package and he
wakes up in the middle of a spy caper with him as the reluctant star. But is
this an elaborate memory implantation or was his brain fried by the Rekall
scientists? And what role does Lori, who is now trying to kill him with her thighs, play in all
this?
If you've seen the 1990 Paul Verhoeven version of Total Recall, with Arnold Schwarzenegger
pulling tracking devices from his nasal cavity, then you know the answers
already. The 1990 version had some memorable quirks — the robotic JohnnyCab
driver, seductress Sharon Stone, Martian belly-monster Kuato, three-breasted hookers, the prosthetic
head mask babbling "Two weeks! Two weeks!" — but it was also one of
those dated hyper-glam future movies that were common in early ’90s. Like Demolition Man or Back To the Future Part II, Total Recall felt
phony and hollow, the product of Hollywood ,
not science fiction.
This version of Total
Recall aims for a more serious tone and it achieves it if only by making
the sci-fi grittier and the action more relentless. Much of the movie is linked
by long chase sequences, including one involving cars that hover over an
electro-magnetic grid. The scene took a wild turn when the chase descends to
another level where the cars hang from the grid like gondolas on a ski lift.
Other chases take place in a three-dimensional elevator shafts, and a rambunctious
romp through a horizontally cascading apartment complex that dangles out over
the rest of the city.
This Total Recall
exists in roughly the same atmosphere as Blade
Runner: the streets are rainy and dark, the cultures are a mega-mix of
East-meets-West, neon signs light up the skyline, and pedestrian sidewalks are
packed with extras wearing radical futurist costumes. I was dismayed to see so
many neon dreadlocks and hear so much chirping-blurping dubstep rattling from
the speakers. Apparently, in the future combs don't exist and they listen to
music from 2011. I was also less than pleased with all the gunplay, which
seemed downright old fashioned compared to some of the other future concepts.
And really, will there be machine gun shootouts in a future where it's possible
to have an elevator through the center of the earth? I like to think we advance
past meaningless gun violence, and so did Dick.
Farrell plays the everyman just fine, although I'm pretty sure his accent changes throughout. Beckinsale is given lots of
hero shots, but her husband, Len Wiseman, is the director so there you go. Jessica
Biel turns up at one point, and she does a commendable job as an action
heroine, but she looks too much like Beckinsale. When they fight in a hallway
in the middle of the movie I couldn't tell who was punching who. Bryan
Cranston, who's making TV history right now on Breaking Bad, turns up as the forgettable villain Cohaagen, a
character played memorably by Ronny Cox in the original.
I mentioned above that Dick's writing has become "science
non-fiction." Of course not all of it. Humanoid replicants, memory implantation,
precognitive time cops and other PKD ideas are unlikely in our lifetime, but where
he really advanced science fiction was his rationalization of these concepts.
He always looked at how humanity accepted, or maybe did not accept, technology
as the answer to the world's problems. Look at Steven Spielberg's excellent Minority Report to see Dick's worries
compounded into a film's story. I would have liked to see more of those
examinations here in Total Recall,
but the movie seemed destined to avoid anything that couldn't be loaded into a
handgun and fired at someone's head.
That's a critical argument I'm making against the film, but I did
enjoy Total Recall. It was
preposterous on many levels, but it also had a consistent tone and structure. I
liked how it propelled itself forward from one action extravaganza to another.
And I liked how it looked, acted and felt like a real science fiction movie.
Those are becoming rare these days, which is strange because Philip K. Dick's
stories have more relevance now than they ever have.
