Philip K Dick wrote a lot of very good stuff. We Can Remember It For You Wholesale was a fun little story about a man with buried memories who runs into trouble when he accidentally finds those buried memories. Arnold’s Total Recall has next to nothing to do with Dick’s story and the new Total Recall has very little to do with the old Total Recall.
That whole bit of business with Mars is tossed out for starters, which makes it a bit odd when the Mars mutant with three boobs shows up. This is also a kinder and gentler Total Recall, where the bulk of the wanton killing happens to a lot of hapless robocops that wandered off the set of Will Smith’s I Robot.
The absurd Mars story is replaced with an absurd Earth story, in which all the world is laid ruin except for Great Britain and Australia. Interestedly, London is no longer a part of Great Britain. And while there is no technology around that could fix whatever is wrong with ninety percent of the world, there is enough tech to build a trans-earth tunnel that connects Great Britain to Australia and people make daily commutes-it takes all of 16 minutes to get from one side of the world to the other. Makes as much sense as zipping to Mars, right?
Total Recall has a ton of gee-whiz special effects, top of the line CGI, lots of Ang Lee style wire work, and very little of anything that makes any sense. Some of the dullest chase scenes in recent memory involve CGI maglev cars and an overly long sequence where our heroes hop around a set of Wonkavators that go upways and sideways and slantways for no apparent reason at all. Why would anyone make a room full of things that just bang into each other? as Sigourney Weaver asks in Galaxy Quest.
In the end the big question of whether or not it’s real never really matters since the ‘real’ world is just as bizarre and impossible as the dream world.
I don’t mind Total Recall rehashing lines from Total Recall, but I didn’t like it when the tech guy at Rekall is quoting Morpheus from The Matrix about What Is Real? Hey, just ruin one old movie at a time, OK?
