"Total Recall" Remake Is Slick And Without Surprises

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Monday, 20 August 2012 18:10

Written by Marek Ozdoba

Total Recall
Directed by Len Wiseman
Starring Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale, Pete Cho

So Len Wiseman, director of the Underworld films, has had the chance to remake Total Recall, which I can't believe is over 20 years old.  He has apparently done this by saying: Let's make it look like Blade Runner swallowed The Fifth Element.

The first Recall was a sprawling adventure hypertrophic in visuals, casting, and plot, as ultimately directed by Paul Verhoeven (after such figures as David Cronenberg had taken a crack at a more psychologically complex story abandoned by the producers for, as Cronenberg termed it, "Raiders of the Lost Ark on Mars"). CGI barely existed when the first version was made, and many of the innovations of that film consisted of a certain over-the-topness. 

Now we have slick effects, and a certain lack of affect goes with that — we just take everything in stride.  In this century we're too cool for hysterical eye-popping and too cool to be impressed by special effects, which also means we don't get to see Arnold Schwarzenegger in a ridiculous getup, now that it can be handled electronically. But is this way more fun?

Most of the audience for this film won't remember the nearest available metaphor, the early '80s, when the first video games began their move into the home and there was a debate over simple Atari games and the other kind, which were better-looking in every way... but less popular.

So does the new Total Recall make innovations to the story, if it can't rely on effects? Not really.

It avoids Mars for echoes of The American Nightmare as we live it now: the 1% destroying the common people, an industrial revolution limiting jobs/creating oppression, and terrorism all have more resonance in the present day than they did in 1990, but the characters have no motivations apart from choosing sides. At a running time near two full hours, you'd think some could be crammed in, but most of the movie consists of very loud gun battles.

The film begins with a very loud gun battle — after a crawl (never a good sign) explaining that the world has been destroyed by chemical warfare, except for England and Australia, the former housing what's left of the economy while Down Under is where they keep the Down Underclass, who commute, every day, through the center of the earth in a conveyance the size of an office building.

Writing that down, it seems to me now a more outlandish movie should've resulted, but the thing is played utterly straight. Doug Quaid (Colin Farrell, in for Arnold) awakes from a dream not of distant mysteries or hidden desires, but obvious backstory. It's so unlike a dream it looks like the main action in medias res, to be followed by a flashback. He is comforted by his wife (Kate Beckinsale), then is off to his job, where he even participates in his disfranchisement by building the very police robots who enforce the police state.

Using androids for cannon fodder, adopting the George Lucas copout from the Star Wars prequels to make violence palatable, it first looks like a move to secure the PG-13, in contrast to the original's R rating. But times have changed — there's nearly as much swearing and about as much violence (though less gore).  Fear not, Douglas Adams fans, the triple-breasted whore is still here.

But to no purpose, because there are no mutants.  In fact, there's no reason for Quaid to go to Rekall, the place that implants memories of adventure in your mind because you can't afford a real vacation since there's nowhere to go because the rest of the planet has been reduced to a chemically ravaged wasteland. 

In keeping with this change, Rekall now looks not like a travel agency but an opium den; for some reason Quaid picks the "secret agent" memory but the tech (John Cho) explains that you break your brain if you try a fantasy that's ever been a part of your real life.  Then he somehow checks this, and stops the procedure.  But it's too late...

Yet this is a major point, because it's objectively obvious the fake-memory thing isn't even in play.  The procedure doesn't wake Quaid up to his real self — he discovers he's a badass accidentally. Then everyone else around him turns badass, then he runs a lot, then he gets a message from himself... his other self... but, again, we're never really sure why he went to Rekall, how it "awakened" him, or why he had to be put there in the first place. 

Modern audiences, we are told, are so smart, they don't need exposition. But sometimes exposition is also pacing. As in the first film, there's a moment where a man appears to tell Quaid he's dreaming; unlike the first film, it makes no sense. 

Verhoeven's excesses always included the audience with a wink, not insisting on their participation but asking for it. Slick entertainment takes itself ultra-seriously, even (especially?) when it's being ridiculous. This makes the older, cartoonier version more engaging, while the new one sort of... happens to you. Neither goes as far as it could with the possibilities of rewritable identity and memory. But by insisting on quicker pacing, modern movies force audiences into a more passive state.

The setting is different but the overall structure is much the same, so fans of the original will encounter few surprises. There's just more shooting, running, krav maga... instead of a fight in an elevator, it's in twenty elevators. 

The geopolitical setup is freshly relevant, and uses the old Roman Empire routine of making the overlords British and the sufferers American, but what's left is futurism of a type that looks familiar, from both the visionary films of 30 years ago and the tech we actually have now.

No one is surprised to see a touchscreen. A skyscraper that dives through the earth, maybe. Maglev cars, no. Add Minority Report and Die Hard to the list of references (and Michael Winterbottom's Code 46, which did the dystopia better). The Phil Dick-ian future shown here via killer production design is still a replay of older movies (and even a TV series, Total Recall 2020). 

So this film contains one great implication, which is that the time of innovation and imagination is over.  All that was done, apparently correctly, in the cheesy '80s. Here in the with-it future, we have nothing to add. Cinema from now on is a matter of rendering only.