Total Recall (2012)
Directed by Len Wiseman
Factory worker Doug Quaid takes a virtual mind-trip vacation with the Rekall company, opting for implanted memories of being a spy. When the procedure goes wrong, Quaid becomes a wanted man by the police and joins forces with a rebel fighter to stop the evil Chancellor Cohaagen.
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4 films that influenced Total Recall
What critics say influenced Total Recall
The result is a vibe that’s part-Blade Runner (with more technological glitz), part-The Fifth Element (minus Gaultier’s flair) and effortlessly immersive.
Set in a dystopic 2084 that lifts an awful lot from Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and a pinch from The Fifth Element, Quaid's psychotropic journey from obliviousness to self-actualizing, anti-government insurgent feels right, but Kurt Wimmer and Mark Bomback's script rarely gives the viewer time to ponder this poor guy's exceedingly existential crisis.
With " Total Recall ," it's like it's trying so hard to be " Star Trek ," then switches gears and jumps to " I, Robot ," then " Minority Report ," then " Blade Runner ," then " The Fifth Element ," and the list just keeps piling up.
You’ll also find similarities to the campy sci-fi flicks “Judge Dredd” and “The Fifth Element.”
If The Fifth Element comes to mind while watching Wiseman's efficient, action-packed retake, well, yup, those floating cars and multitiered, M.C.
Quaid lives in a metropolis that looks like Wiseman took two cityscapes from “The Fifth Element,” stacked one on top of the other around the labyrinth from “Cube,” and then bow-tied the whole thing together with the multi-tiered freeways from “Minority Report.”
COLUMBIA PICTURESColin Farrell takes on one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s signature roles in the new "Total Recall."
We figure out way too early that factory worker Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell) might be married to someone (Kate Beckinsale) with an agenda that involves a little more than shopping—although it’s not clear where these people shop, because director Len Wiseman (“Underworld”) is content to offer a two-dimensional world about which we don’t know a lot of details. “Total Recall” 2012 is a popcorn movie, and we’re not supposed to ask what the butter is REALLY made of.
The 1990 sci-fi classic “Total Recall” has been ‘rebooted,’ ‘re-tooled’, ‘re-imagined’ and ultimately stripped bare of the creative boundaries, social commentary and originality of its predecessor.
CAST: Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale, Jessica Biel, Bryan Cranston DIRECTOR: Len Wiseman LENGTH: 1:18 What's the difference between the "Total Recall" in theaters today and the original film from 1990?
In 1990, director Paul Verhoeven and various screenwriters (including Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett, the pair who penned the original 1979 Alien) took this premise and expanded on it, turning the short story into the feature-length Total Recall and having their protagonist actually visit Mars rather than just remembering it.
Like its predecessor, the new "Total Recall" was inspired by a 1966 short story titled "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" by the late Philip K. Dick, who specialized in science-fiction tales of existential paranoia and identity crisis, as seen in such other good and bad film adaptations of his work as "Blade Runner," "Minority Report," " A Scanner Darkly " and " The Adjustment Bureau ."
Every few years someone tries to put Philip Dick on the screen, but the paranoid questions at the heart of his work get smothered by state-of-the-art technology; even A Scanner Darkly was literally coated by rotoscope animation.
It probably doesn’t help that he greeted Hauser by saying, “Mister Hauser,” and their conversation that followed felt awfully similar to Neo’s conversation with The Architect in “ The Matrix Reloaded .”