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WMG / Total Recall (1990)

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What the sequel would have been about...
Everything that happened was real. Quaid and Melina are living happily on Mars. However, Quaid has been having nightmares, and they're about Hauser. He wants his body back and tries to by controlling Quaid's "body". Almost like a Jekyll-and-Hyde scenario. Richter is probably still alive, and wears robotic arms. He becomes the new Big Bad.
  • Wrong, according to Wikipedia and its more reliable sources. The sequel planned to use mutant psychics as part of a law-enforcement agency (which Quaid joins), in order to stop crimes before they actually occur. This was based on another Phillip K. Dick novel and was eventually rewritten into Minority Report.
    • So the sequel would be something else entirely.
There had been other attempts to have Total Recall 2 made. The result would have been an even bigger Mind Screw than the original.
  • Total Recall 2: Hauser's revenge

Recall is an early implementation of Dollhouse technology
Before it causes all the trouble on Earth. Maybe it was Quaid's failure to go back to his original personality that made them create the call-and-response feature that keeps dolls in line.

The Rekall "secret agent" vacation was not a coincidence, and everything is real. It was how they planned to activate Hauser all along
The plan was for him to lead the Big Bad to Kuato. There had to be some way of activating him after the memory wipe. Unfortuantely, things didn't quite go according to plan.
  • Cohaagen specifically tells Quaid that he screwed up their plans by finding his memories too early. They weren't expecting him to go to Rekall.
    • And Quaid's "best friend" was assigned to make sure he doesn't do anything to get his memories to resurface too soon.

Kuato is a descendant of RL Jordi Pujol i Soley, President of the Catalonian Autonomous Community between 1980 and 2003.
Come on, look at him. The resemblance is uncanny.

Hauser was Good All Along
OK, first, we're going off the theory that everything was real, because we saw that Rekall tried to wipe his memory of being there and put him in the Johnnycab, with Lori trying to kill him, the viewer saw that Cohaagen tried the "You've been in Rekall all along" to get Quaid, and that didn't work. So now let's recap:
  • Quaid's wish of doing the "deep cover secret agent" was from his repressed memories of actually being one, hence the dreams of Mars. The terms being "deep cover".
  • Cohaagen claimed that he didn't want to kill Quaid, but not only was Richter going after him, but so was Lori, attempting to slash him with the knife.
  • Hauser is brilliant, probably moreso than Cohaagen. He's the one with the deep-cover secret agent personality and should've anticipated if something went wrong (Quaid actually believing he was the good guy). For an incredibly complicated plan, this seems like a major oversight.
  • Cohaagen was trying to use a Mind Screw on Quaid to believe that he was the mole to lead him to Kuato and showed him Hauser's voice clip. However, first, everything Quaid knows about Hauser and why he became Quaid is from Cohaagen. What if the clip of Hauser telling him how he led them Kuato is faked somehow? After all, this is a world with brainwashing, Latex Perfection robotic masks, and other things, so it's possible that Cohaagen had done that to make Quaid give up. He seems like the type to be The Chessmaster anyway.
  • So how did the bad guys find out where Kuato was? Benny. He was the mole, otherwise, there really wouldn't be a reason to have him suddenly show that he was Evil All Along. Benny probably had a tracker to lead them right to it.
  • Hauser really did figure out what would ruin Cohaagen's plans and volunteered to be brainwashed, because he's the Double Reverse Quadruple Agent that would do such a thing, while telling Quaid that "he got to me first". At some point, Cohaagen figured out what was going on due to a Gambit Pileup and had to revise his plans, making it first that he was still in Rekall to turn back to Hauser and figure out what the big secret was before Kuato got to him first, then using the Mind Screw tactic to believe that Hauser had "succeeded" and brainwashing him to close any loose ends. Unfortunately, when Cohaagen figured out what Hauser was up to and had to rapidly change plans on the fly (at least twice), that sort of information wasn't sent to Richter, Lori, and the other agents, which is why they had very real plans to kill him.

Rekall intentionally inserts denigration of its own product into its vacation packages.
As the saying goes, "If you do things right, people won't even be sure that you did anything at all." Bob explicitly tells Quaid that his brain will not be able to tell the difference between his real memories and the implanted ones, and an easy first-response method to achieve that would be to have the memories themselves deny that the procedure even had anything to do with the scenario being remembered. Post-Rekall visit, the tram commercial states that memory manipulation is unwise and dangerous; and his own wife decries them as dangerous before being outted as The Mole. These are perfectly reasonable things to expect, and Rekall could be savvy enough to know and exploit that. And in the end, their methods were still much more effective than similar means used by the villain of the Ego Trip scenario, who did virtually nothing short of a cursory restraining of the subject(s) to enact their own memory implantation technology.

The movie's events were a dream/memory vacation, but the doctor at the mid point was not an outside agent telling Quaid that the memory implant had gone horribly wrong and that he had to wake up or be lobotomized, but an aspect of the process put in to smooth in possible rough patches.
Based on the film's presentation and basic logical examination of how Recall would work, we know
  • 1) That the implanted person has to experience the memories in a dream-like state before they wake up with said memories.
  • 2) That the implanted memories are so well crafted and inserted that anyone who purchases them cannot tell them apart from real memories.
  • 3) That everyone is different, hence there is likely a fair bit of looseness in the memories so that people can 'fill in the gaps' on how they think they would react. It would be counter-intuitive if the package was a static set of experiences, because there would surely be people who would know that they would not react like that.

As a result, there's probably various tricks and effects Recall can use if issues arise while the process is ongoing. Doctor Edgemar appears after Quaid had seemingly hit a dead end: the woman he was seeking has rejected him and he doesn't know what to do next. To get the memory-plot back on track, Edgemar appears for some reverse psychology, similar to the suggested WMG above about Recall insulting itself to reinforce itself. Because if what he said was true that it was all a dream and Quaid shooting him would have no effect, there would NOT have been a faint but visible trickle of sweat that indicated fear. By performing the 'example' that brings back Lori as Quaid's supposed concerned wife and then giving Quaid a sign that it's a trap, causing him to shoot the doctor, the memory gets a jumpstart and Quaid continues on, now no longer in a dead end, without it seeming overt that his reality just got switched around some so that the 'memory-story' could fully complete. This also means at the end Quaid is not being lobotomized, but just waking up after the procedure is complete.

Quaid was partially formed from Hauser's guilty conscience
Why would Hauser allow a personality implant that would want to do something that could potentially screw up the entire mission? Why not implant an aversion that would only disengage after an appropriate trigger? Because deep down, Hauser did feel bad about what he was doing, but couldn't muster the moral fortitude to actually rebel. As a result, the Quaid personality was able to fight back and do what the original refused to do.

The Mars is doomed
The movie shows a happy ending in which Mars has an atmosphere and everyone breathes easily the new martian air, but that is literally after a few minutes after turning the machine on. What happens a few hours/days/weeks later? To the best of everyone's knowledge, a total destruction of Mars. Scientist told Cohaagen in the flashback that turning on the alien machine would create a global meltdown and while he and Quaid were being sucked outside he begged Quaid not to turn it on, because: "Everybody will die!" That also explains why the aliens never turned it on. They built it, realized that it would not work properly and abandoned it.
  • Especially when you consider that there would be a whole host of factors to make Mars maintain an atmosphere, simply pumping a huge amount of air from a single machine would only work short-term, eventually it would run out of ice and then the lack of anything that keeps the air on planet would make Mars uninhabitable again, unless Turbinium somehow causes mass terraforming that we didn't see.

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