Total Recall is a 1990 Sci-fi film loosely based on the Phillip K. Dick short story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale", starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and directed by Paul Verhoeven.On its face it's a sci-fi take on a spy thriller, set in memories implanted into a bored construction worker of the future... or is it? Because of all the Alternate Character Interpretation, the film is often called "The thinking man's action movie."Douglas Quaid (Arnold S.) is tired of life Twenty Minutes into the Future. His literal life's dream is to get his ass to Mars as a way of escaping his humdrum existence. A commercial for the Rekall brand "Ego Trip" induces Quaid to try one of the trips, which are just implanted memories of a vacation that he'd never be able to take in person. Quaid elects for an enhanced set of fake memories that cast him in the role of a super spy—sort of a memory novella that he will remember living through. When something goes wrong with the procedure, he discovers that his entire life is a lie, and that in reality, he is a super spy working under deep cover. Or is he?The viewer is constantly challenged to decide if Quaid's experiences are real or all just a result of his "ego trip." The film is also well known for its special effects and over-the-top gore, like someother notable Verhoeven films. Highlights include tons of cool guns, three-breasted mutants, and a bizarre NES tie-in game (Or do they?)A less-campy remake starring Colin Farrell was released in 2012.
Total Recall provides examples of:
Action Girl: Melina. Thumbelina probably also qualifies due to how much ass she kicks during the brothel shootout.
Adaptation Expansion: Philip K. Dick's short story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale". The Piers Anthony novelization of the movie expands on things even further, giving a few glimpses into the alien race that created the reactors and adding a bit of gratuitous sex.
Mars is roughly under half an AU from Earth at closest approach, meaning it should take at least three minutes each way for the Video Phones to send messages.
There are so many things wrong with Mars in this film.
The finale is especially egregious though: melting the frozen core of the planet fills the atmosphere with water, turning Mars into an earth-like, perfectly viable planet in a few seconds. Yeah, it makes perfect sense. Bigger problem: a frozen planetary core?! The ideal gas law, PV = nrT, shows that pressure and temperature are positively correlated (ie the higher the pressure, the higher the temperature). Think about it.
Another problem with Mars is how the atmosphere is treated. In reality, Mars has an atmosphere that's too thin for humans to breathe, but the movie treats it as though there's no atmosphere whatsoever so that when someone steps outside, they're essentially in the vacuum of space. They also violently swell up, something that realistically wouldn't even happen in space, and really wouldn't happen on the surface of Mars.
In the fight scene in the memory implantation suite on Mars, one of the technicians attacks Quaid with a slender metal rod, but between the more than meter of metal and his own strength, he's not able to even raise a bruise on Quaid when he parries the rod with his bare forearm, but it's still strong enough for Quaid to drive it through his attacker's skull. Being able to drive the thick metal lug that had held one of the restraining cuffs to the chair (before Quaid simply lifts the restraint straight up out of the arm) into another technician's neck and create a rather neat, circular wound is similarly silly. (OK, it's an Arnold fight scene so the laws of physics tend to go out the window, but things really should make more sense than that.)
Richter's goons surround Hauser's hologram on all sides, firing from less than 10 feet away without ever hitting each other even though the bullets should be passing right through the hologram.
And then, in the same scene some other goons die because the bullets do go through the hologram. It's bad enough that the gunfire works silly, but much worse when it's inconsistently silly.
"Two weeks. Two weeks...two weeks, twoweekstwotweekstwoweeks..."
Bulletproof Human Shield: Played painfully, painfully straight. Quaid uses a dead bystander this way in the subway scene and by the time Quaid and his meat shield get to the top of the escalator the corpse is basically Swiss cheese, but still no bullets go through to strike Quaid.
Completely Different Title: Apparently translating the title was difficult, leading to things such as Voyage au centre de la mémoire ("Journey to the Center of the memory"), O Vingador do Futuro (The Avenger of the Future), Desafio Total (Total Challenge), Atto di forza ("Act of (brute) force")... And all of those are completely different from the original short story's, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.
That's why in Romania, where foreign movies are subtitled not dubbed, they didn't even bother with a translation. The movie was marketed as Total Recall. Same for the sequel.
Cool Guns: Look for Pancor Jackhammers street sweepers whenever Richter is really pissed off. Also the cool magazine-on-the-back Calico weapons.
Continuous Decompression: Hull breaches on the Mars station causes a storm capable of hurling people through the air, despite the pressure difference being just one atmosphere. (14 psi)
Cuckoo Nest: During the Red Pill, Blue Pill scene where Quaid supposedly is in a dream and Dr. Edgemar wants Quaid to take a pill so he'll wake up.
Dark Is Not Evil / Light Is Not Good: Ironically, the script makes lovable blonde girl-next-door Lori a villain, while the dark-skinned, slutty ("sleazy," to use Quaid's term), and rude Melina is the sympathetic one.
Death by Irony: Cohaagen, who controls all the air on Mars, dies in the thin atmosphere of the Red Planet.
Disney Villain Death: Richter. Although unlike most Disney villain deaths, its purpose was definitely not to avoid gore - it's quite gory, except in the M-rated version.
Dragon with an Agenda: Richter nearly screws up Cohaagen's plans several times, because Cohaagen wants Quaid alive for whatever his plans are, and Richter is constantly trying to kill him to avenge his wife Lori, whom Quaid killed (and the fact that Lori was Quaid's 'wife' for a while and was constantly in bed with him can't have helped either).
DVD Commentary: The one for this film is particularly hilarious. For one, Verhoeven's Dutch accent, coupled with Schwarzenegger's Austrian accent, serve to make it almost unintelligible. Schwarzenegger's commentary consists almost entirely of making jokes about the three-breasted hooker, a grating tendency for stating the patently obvious ("This is me as a construction worker", "I used this guy as a Human Shield and then threw him down the escalator"), and expressing how he likes certain parts of the movie because they serve to reinforce the possibility that it's All Just a Dream. Verhoeven for his part has a Verbal Tic that leads him to end most of his sentences with "Izznit?"
Eye Scream: The eyes of characters exposed to the near-vacuum atmosphere of Mars. Even if they recover from suffocation, they should be blind after their eyes have taken that kind of abuse. But then, the entire movie seems to be a case of Eyes Are Unbreakable.
Failed a Spot Check: Quaid seems unaware of Kuato's resistance movement, despite it being featured on the news at the beginning of the film. Apparently, he simply tuned out the words "terrorist attack" and focussed solely on the Mars part.
Faux Action Girl: Subverted by Quaid's "wife" Lori. At one point, she seems to be becoming one, then proceeds to start kicking ass all over again.
Human Shield: The poor bastard on the escalator with the backpack. Quaid discovers he's being attacked when the first volley of gunfire hits the guy he uses as a human shield and causes him a severe case of death. Multiple gunshot wounds to the upper chest, neck, and head will do that to a fella.
Its A Small World After All: Mars has one red light district (Venusville), and is arranged into sectors that number enough to be designated letters of the alphabet. Since we don't know how much of Mars was colonized, it's possible that the human population there all lives in the same city.
Laser-Guided Karma: Cohaagen turns off the air supply for Venusville and later kicks over a fishbowl, callously leaving both to die from suffocation. He later dies himself the same way, suffocating in the thin atmosphere of Mars.
Mind Screw: Quaid's entire adventure follows the plot of the super spy vacation he orders, as described by the Rekall salesman. Coincidence?!? Or was it?
Moment Killer: While Quaid and Melina are kissing in the catacombs.
Mook Lieutenant: Everett, the chief guard on mars, and Helm, Richter's lead goon who accompy's him for half of the film before meeting a rather gruesome end during the bar shoot-out.
Quaid and Melina, who somehow instantly recover from Decompression fairly quickly, despite it being previously shown to turn people into jelly.
It seems that the alien reactor also managed to bring the pressure to Earth-Norm, but it still shouldn't have been that fast.
No OSHA Compliance: Rather than kicking in automatically, the emergency pressure doors in the Mars spaceport terminal have to be manually activated while potentially (as happens in the film) fighting against being sucked into a near-vacuum.
Note to Self: The video messages Hauser leaves for Quaid.
It all comes down to whether the the scene between when they start the implantation process and when Quaid wakes up in the Johnny Cab is a part of the hallucination or if it really happened. And there's absolutely nothing that says one way or the other.
Planetville: Even the presence of other tropes reinforce this. For example, the atmospheric pressurization is so fast that if it was interpreted as accurate, it not only shrinks the colony to appreciable city-size, but the whole damn planet.
Rare Guns: The Pankor Jackhammer, though it is actually a Cobray Sweet Streeper made to look like one. It's not very convincing, but damn if it doesn't look cool.
Schrödinger's Butterfly: Is it a memory implant gone awry, or all real? In the short story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale that inspired this (can't say based on, can't even say very, very loosely based on), it did really happen.
Science Marches On (Geology): Mars having an ice core turned out to be partially true.
Self-Disposing Villain: Technically, Quaid kills neither Richter nor Cohaagen. The first one has his arms cut off by a moving elevator and falls to his death, and the Big Bad suffocates when exposed to Martian atmosphere.
These Hands Have Killed: Quaid does this right after he slaughters the five agents trying to kill him on Earth, before he goes back to his "wife" Lori. He actually has their blood on his hands at the time.
The Tape Knew You Would Say That: Hauser leaves instructions to Quaid, anticipates how Quaid is going to react at various points, and seems to know roughly how long it'll take him to remove the tracking device, before continuing.
Tracking Chip: Quaid has been implanted with a tracking chip in his head which he manages to find out about and remove before the bad guys can reach him.
Uncle Tomfoolery: Benny the cab driver, until he reveals himself as a mutant collaborator. And especially after that turns out to be a lie and he was Evil All Along.
Video Phone: Used on both Earth and Mars. Talking to someone on Mars was as easy as phoning them up on Earth. In fact, Cohaagen (when on Mars) uses his vid phone to call Richter (on Earth) without any technical difficulties or time delay.
Villainous Breakdown: Richter has a brief one after Lori's death, but pulls himself together quite quickly after nearly killing himself and his head goon.
Your Head Asplode: Subverted, where the exploding head is a bomb-rigged animatronic prosthesis which Quaid wears as part of a costume. His deception uncovered, he tosses the head to his pursuers, in whose hands it cracks wise and then asplodes. Also averted and played straight, since the thin Martian atmosphere causes one bad guy's head to a splode. Arnie and his gal narrowly avoid the same fate.
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