Total Recall (2012)

Early reviews at Rotten Tomatoes are not being kind to this one.

Popular consensus is beginning to describe a movie that is devoid of narrative logic and consistency (which, for a sci-fi/fantasy film, pretty much guarantees this to be terrible all on its own, if it's indeed true), borrows from other (better) films, lacks nuance and sensibility, and, overall, is very dull. In other words, it's sounding more like a new Johnny Mnemonic than a new Total Recall.

edited 2nd Aug '12 5:25:51 PM by SeanMurrayI

So, stuff this new film and get an anniversary edition of the Arnie film on Blu-ray instead then?

Seems that way. Darn. I was really looking forward to this. I'll watch it regardless, but I know it won't be good as the original.

Exactly.

I dunno, this new remake seems to take itself waaayyy too seriously.

I'm in it for Jessica Biel and Kate Beckinsale.

Haven't read any of the online reviews yet, but after watching it I'm pretty tempted to say the critics either didn't watch the original or missed a bunch of major clues and genre lampshades the film. Major spoilers ahead, particularly for those who haven't watched either the new one of the original...

For instance, the moment main character is put into the VR chair and given the injection, the movie immediately turns into a balls-to-the-walls action flick, with the hero doing all kinds of martial arts, shooting with near-perfect accuracy, and surviving absurd situations. The "plot twists", if you can even call them that, are cliche: his wife turns out to be a sleeper-agent meant to monitor him and suddenly develops a completely different persona and accent upon the revelation, he was allegedly one of the greatest government agents to exist before his amnesia, he has access to information in his head that can save the world, etc. The story slowly begins to make the world revolve around him as it's revealed that he was a war buddy with the President (and now his main enemy), he's highly prized by the resistance movement for all he's taught them, and literally has the woman from his dreams in love with him. Basically, he's no longer an unimportant schmuck: he's somebody special and important now.

But to be fair, I didn't like how this film basically followed the core plot of the original movie and didn't bother to throw in a twist or two: if you've watched the previous one, you more or less know how it's all going to play out, even despite all of the changes to the setting. And the possibility that he might actually be a secret agent is made somewhat harder to swallow by the fact that everything he does to survive is crazy, even by James Bond or Jason Bourne's standards.

Strangely enough, what I loved the most about the movie is the universe they've created: it's got a lot of implausible features and oddities, but at the same time it manages to craft a futuristic/cyberpunk world that actually looks pretty decent, perhaps even fun to live in. Glow-in-the-dark tattoos, three-boobed chicks, PD As that are literally built into your hand and can display on anything with a glass surface, omni-directional elevators, "The Fall" elevator which can take you from one polar edge of the world to the other in 20 minutes, robot police that actually care about avoiding civilian casualties when starting fights in public areas (well at least until the ending)... it's got a lot of interesting ideas, that's for sure.

There is only dubiety at the end of the original film because Verhoeven is a world class troll. In the original story, which must be taken as canon if you give it any relationship to the film that Verhoeven eventually came out with, Quail (Quaid's name in the original story) was an agent and had saved the world.

Verhoeven, who is the sort of man that can take a film about strippers in Vegas and make it the most anti-erotic pile of shit ever put on cinema, hates happy endings, or endings that make sense as much as Stephen King does.

Does Robocop count as a "happy ending"? Sure, OCP's still gonna demolish Detroit, but Murphy's back, and he's killed Boddicker and Jones.

I would argue that demolishing Detroit *is* the happy ending. . .

I thought Detroit ultimately wasn't demolished in that, though...

In sequels that Verhoeven had nothing to do with.

Well, Taylor said he enjoyed it. He's fairly reflective of my enjoyment preferences, so I'd go with that.

I saw it, and I have to say that I enjoyed it. I know some people who are whining about it not being set on Mars, but I didn't let that bother me. I loved the visual look, but it was blatantly obvious they filmed most of it in Toronto. I should know, they used one of the University of Toronto dorm buildings (the one my brother was staying in) for the one London ground shot in the movie. They didn't even bother trying to hide the subway. Clean it up a tad, and you have the Toronto Subway system, as crappy as it is.

edited 10th Aug '12 9:02:11 PM by Zendervai

Saw it, opinions:

General feel:

Very very similar to the original.

Aesthetic switched for a more modern one featuring grungy future reminiscent of a more cyperpunky version of Blade Runner for The Colony and the more traditional scifi thriller stuff you see these days with lots of floating holograms and stuff similar to Minority Report for the British scenes.

I'm not sure if they've tightened the plot a lot or not. It feels worse to me because of the Fall and why it exists, which seems to be a lazy grab at economics BS. I'd have structured it differently if it were me, simply put.

Improvements:

None of the cheesy eighties blood and rubber body parts. Those have been replaced with the cheesy robot mangling.

The mind fuckery scene is much better with the new actor they replaced the raging twat in the old one with. This one was a lot easier to believe that he was actually still in Recall.

There is a catfight between the two female leads. Kate's character also stays alive for a lot longer.

Failures:

I feel that the original showed the motives for the rebels better. Until the end, they just seemed to be generic rebels rebelling against authority.

edited 14th Aug '12 10:31:18 PM by Deboss

Watched it just because I was too tired for anything useful. Didn't expect anything, so I wasn't disappointed. (Okay, a little more Biel skin might have helped.) I don't give a damn whether some part of it was real, or not. Watch it, forget it.

The only thing that bothered me to some extent was the whole "Fall" thingie. Yeah, Rule of Cool, but once you start thinking about it, it makes no sense at all. If you have that kind of technology, you could easily exploit it to make room for all those people, base an economy on it, etc. Why is there only one "Fall"? Who came up with the idea, and why? How can it be cheaper and easier to drill a hole through the whole planet than just drive around it? Or, I don't know, invest all that technological power in restoring at least parts of the planet? After all, they somehow managed to have their little inhabitable zones, so it would make sense to try and expand those. Etc. etc.

Duh. I did it again. Started thinking about a movie that's clearly not designed for any mental activity. My bad.

I think they stole it from Thursday Next. There's a series of trains that travel through the Earth's mantle instead of easily accessible airplanes. It worked in Thursday Next just because the entire series has this feel that something is really screwed up about the world it takes place in.

Also, what the hell is in the poisonous air that subways can get through, but not planes?

edited 2nd Feb '13 6:44:31 AM by Zendervai

I suspect it has more to do with fuel requirements. Flying around the planet in one shot can't be easy on the fuel tank.

I imagine that drilling a hole through the whole planet takes enough fuel for quite a few flights all around it. And falling through it is far from inexpensive itself. For one, it is not exactly cool in there, and you have to keep those people alive somehow. Creating and maintaining something that can endure hot lava under HUGE pressure must be expensive as hell, too. Moreover, you have to counter earth's rotation or you get stuck along the way.

I'm sure there's serious research on that somewhere on the web, but I'm far too lazy and hungover to look it up now. Maybe someone is so kind and gives us a link.

I was pointing out why flying around the world was impractical. The Fall was a silly concept use for Rule of Cool. For instance, apparently the robot factories^note which really shouldn't exist considering fucking robots are in the rich neighborhood, which makes no real sense to me. Rich people don't want factories in their neighborhoods, they are generally in the poor neighborhoods. 90% of what's in a rich neighborhood is recreational stuff, not industrial. Admittedly, there'd be some fabrication sites there since it's the size of a country and it's easier to have a local fab shop than ship everything in, but that's just a general issue with cross country commuting in scifi.

As little in-universe sense as it makes, I suspect the filmmakers had humans manufacturing the robot police for the sake of the "lower classes forced to help build the tools of their own oppression" imagery.

Or they just did it because it was cool when THX 1138 did it.

Good one! Actually, wouldn't shipping the goods be a LOT easier than shipping the people, twice a day, every single day?

Yes, considerably. As Meta Four pointed out, they traded statement for logic.

Not only that, but you could ship it with purely automated ships. Current super tankers have a dozen people tops on them. However, this ruins the "super commuting" that seems to be popular with current scifi distopia (Avatar had a similar issue) to relate to modern issues of poverty (I guess?). The issue is that there's a floor on how cheap shipping human cargo between two areas can be, it's particularly stupid when it's cross continent domestic labor.

I think what would have been a better system would have been to have all the factories and whatnot be under ground, where the poor are forced to live with terrible air quality. Above ground is a lush farmland, but every square inch of the land is used for growing food stuffs to ship to the rich group. Or the rich live in sprawling golf courses of wasted ground, whatever.

Instead of restricting access to management, the jobs themselves require high level education and training (or implants, whatever) with only education from the rich schools being accepted for such positions, regardless of actual skill, bonus points if they've got a bunch of bull shit humanities courses for a tech degree. So, our hero has an education, he just didn't suck the right dicks to get some twat to sign it.

Drop the factory welding. Entirely. If you've got a factory that makes robots on an assembly line, you're going to use robots for the tack welding (which is what was done, IIRC) in fixed locations. There's room for humans on this position, as people who check the welds or whatever, but a simple "hold cpu to chest, tack in place" job is something they should have had their robots build a robot for. Don't get me wrong, human welders would still be employed, but as a versatile and/or small shop welders where the welds aren't assembly line standard and friggin' tacks.

Make him someone that fixes the machines and I could see him being employed in the robot factory. The job he had should not have existed as it's something that can be taught in a few minutes (we actually see him do this!) and there's a goddamn army of robots that could be swapped for that job.