Total Recall (2012): ***/*****,
or 6/10
Total
Recall (1990) is still a high point in Paul Verhoeven's oeuvre.
At the time the most expensive movie ever made, it featured Arnold
Schwarzenegger at the height of his career, running for his life from
government conspirators in a provocative, nightmarish future setting
both on Earth and on Mars, all the while messing with the spectator's
mind in determining whether his tribulations were for real or just a
sign of his brain being screwed up just moments before a lobotomy, in
the typical sardonic and satirical Verhoeven style. Of course,
nowadays nothing is sacred in Hollywood, and since more than two
decades have passed the executive powers that be decided it was time
for a fresh adaptation of Philip K. Dick's short story We Can
Remember It for You Wholesale (1966).
Adaptation, however, is too strong a term: inspiration would be more
precise, something underscored by the end credits which state the new
movie was only inspired by Dick's original work. In fact, it takes
even more poetic license with his story than Verhoeven's version did.
Unfortunately, various elements that made the previous film such a
joy to watch are wholesomely neglected this time around, while the
overall story remained the same. As a result, the new Total
Recall is neither more
sophisticated nor more fun to watch than its predecessor.
The
narrative core of Verhoeven's Total Recall
is carried over largely intact into the new movie. Douglas Quaid
(Colin Farrell, who portrays a bored laborer more convincingly but
less enjoyably than the hulking Schwarzengger did) is an everyday
underpaid factory worker tired of his dull dead-end job, living in a
lousy apartment with his beautiful wife Lori (Kate Beckinsale).
Longing for an escape from the boring routine of his life, he visits
Rekall, a company that implants fake memories the customer never
experienced but that seem totally real as if the subject lived
through them himself. In need of a dramatic change of pace, Quaid
orders a set of secret agent memories injected in his mind, after
which all hell breaks loose when apparently dormant but true
experiences of a life as a spy manifest themselves, after which he
finds himself on the run from the authorities, including his wife who
proved to be an undercover operative, in their attempt to stop Quaid
from exposing an elaborate government conspiracy involving corrupt
officials out for personal gain at the expense of the lives of
thousands of oppressed workers. Trouble is, are we sure all of
Quaid's newfound experiences are real, or are they just what he
ordered, with the problem being he can't separate truth from fiction
as his mind has trouble processing it all?
Warning!
Spoilers ahead! With
the overall story of the remake identical to the original motion
picture, the differences of the new script mostly involve setting and
background history. Still set in the not too distant future, the plot
now takes place on a post-apocalyptic Earth where chemical warfare
has ravaged most of the planet, leaving only Western Europe and
Australia habitable. Dubbed the United Federation of Britain and the
Colony respectively, the former is the seat of power ruling what's
left of the globe with an iron fist, while the latter houses the huge
work force keeping things running, as well as home to the many
dispossessed masses whose sole task in life is day-to-day survival.
Travel between the UFB and the Colony is only possible via the Fall,
a sort of giant subway system through the planet's core, allowing the
laborers – Quaid among them – to journey to their work every
day, deporting them back to the ass-end of the planet when the day is
over just as easily. Of course there is resistance to this
near-enslavement, most notably in the shape of a terrorist group run
by the enigmatic Matthias (an all too small part for the great Bill
Nighy), out to destroy the Fall and wreaking havoc in the process.
Naturally, the terrorists are the ones we should feel sympathy for
considering the hard exploitative regime that controls the
workforce's life under the rule of the sinister Chancellor Cohaagen
(Breaking Bad's Bryan
Cranston), who is secretly hatching a diabolical scheme to get rid of
all the miscreants and malcontents in the slums: his motivations for
doing so differ from Total Recall's
previous incarnation, where he sought to control alien technology.
His venture in the current film involves replacing the human workers
with robots, a scheme rather derivative of other science fiction
works including the likes of I, Robot (2004):
there's a reason Total Recall's
mechanical men are so reminiscent to that movie's droids.
Unlike
both the short story and Verhoeven's take on that, all the action is
Earth bound and Mars is nowhere to be seen, other than being only
briefly mentioned – in a post-John Carter Hollywood
Mars is not a welcome location – so the script switches locations
between the UFB and the Colony. Location wise, this turns out to be a
mistake. Whereas the trip to Mars only worked to the predecessor's
visual advantage, setting it apart from the action that had gone
before and underscoring the eerie, dreamy quality of the piece, the
visual look of the UFB and the Colony in this version is totally
interchangeable. Both areas are defined by excessive urbanization, as
overpopulation has led to ever upward building, with an elaborate
maze of mile high towering constructions the result. Though the
abundance of CGI thrown at these sets makes it look stunning at
first, amazement soon turns to acceptance, and acceptance even faster
turns to visual disinterest as the movie spends almost two hours
following the protagonist being driven from one skyscraper to the
next in a string of dynamic chase scenes that eventually make it hard
to tell just where on the planet we are exactly. An all too brief
excursion to the terrorists' secret layer in the desolate wastelands
outside the habitable zone offers little reprieve from this
monotonous setting, which in itself is very obviously inspired by
undying science fiction classics like Blade Runner
(1982) and Metropolis
(1927), but used to much less dramatic effect because of its
overexposure.
Equally
overused is action. Of course, a big Hollywood blockbuster like Total
Recall needs action scenes to
draw crowds, but not in numbers this high. From the moment Quaid's
unconscious cover is exposed in the Rekall salon, he spends most of
the film running for cover as he's hunted by Cohaagen's minions, both
robotic and flesh and blood, Lori chief among them. If Quaid's not
running, he's fighting his way through scores of bad guys. The plot
only allows short intermissions for the audience to catch its breath,
at which time a great deal of exposition is delivered in as little
time as is deemed necessary to warrant the next thirty minutes of
relentless action, until the end credits start rolling. Just as the
surroundings where such action takes place, the action scenes
themselves are similarly interchangeable. Not even a flying car chase
(a little too reminiscent of The Fifth Element (1997))
and a pursuit in a labyrinth of elevators offer enough diversion to
keep the action from mentally becoming one big blur when the theater
lights go back on. Director Wiseman knows action like few others, as
he amply showed with movies like Underworld (2003)
and Die Hard 4.0. (2007),
but the script just kept him from balancing action and exposition to
appropriate levels, while the ever singular looking environments
didn't allow him to come up with interesting new ideas to shoot such
action other than a bunch of general shoot-them-ups. At least his
skill in directing fight scenes makes it easy for Total
Recall's to look convincingly
brutal, entertaining the viewers for a while before such scenes
become too commonplace to really care less about them.
With
the focus a little too much on action, it comes as no surprise that
other areas of the film's whole remain underexposed. Chief casualty
is the emotional climax provided in Verhoeven's version, which made
you guess until the very end just as to what's real and what isn't.
The script largely follows the same pattern as the original did, but
makes it clear all too soon and all too obvious whether its
allegiance lies to fiction or reality, thus disabling the audience's
pleasure to debate the exact chain of events since there's no room
left for speculation. At times the film appears to turn the table on
the audience's expectations, just as eager to switch it back mere
moments later so the audience doesn't get to be confused, even though
it would undoubtedly expect and like to be confused at least a little
considering the picture deals with messing with man's mind. This lack
of guts to smarten up the movie where it easily can be done makes it
all the harder to accept a short lecture at the Rekall facility about
the brain and its inner workings: in light of the lack of plot twists
and the loads of dull action scenes to come, the movie at this point
pretentiously seems to say 'here's how the brain works, now you can
go and shot down yours for a few hours since there's really nothing
more to our plot'. Worse even is the absolutely serious tone Total
Recall adopts for the next
ninety minutes, as it leaves little room for humour to put things in
perspective considering the absence of intelligence. Among the car
chases, the gun fights and the hand to hand combat there's no place
for a laugh or two to remind the audience this isn't all as serious
as it appears to be, unlike Paul Verhoeven's tone of witty sarcasm
that only enhanced his Total Recall's
sense of wonder and adventure. You'll find no Johnny-Cab in this
film, though as time goes on you desperately want there to be...
Total
Recall (2012) is a perfect
example of a Hollywood exercise in futility as far as remakes go. It
does not improve on the earlier version, nor does it address elements
from the plot of the original short story the 1990 film might have
ignored. It regurgitates a well crafted story and spits it out in a
slicker and stylistically more modern variation that sadly fails to
captivate the audience, taking itself way too seriously while
simultaneously explicitly weeding out the plot hints that might have
made for a more thought provoking, inconclusive ending. What remains
is a generic high voltage chase flick filled with standard fisticuffs
and gun fights in a visually impressive but monotonous and uninspired
environment, which moderately entertain the viewer for two hours, but
ultimately prove to be wholly forgetful. The only thing the producers
apparently picked up from Paul Verhoeven's classic is the
unforgettable image of a triple breasted prostitute, an all too brief
pointless insert that only serves as a nostalgic nod to a superior
take on this same story. Clearly it doesn't suffice to take a
Verhoeven flick and throw out everything that makes it recognizable
as such, since that's what makes it memorable. With remakes of
Verhoeven's other excellent Sci-Fi/action films RoboCop
(1987) and Starship
Troopers (1997) in production,
Hollywood executives best recall the many shortcomings of Total
Recall (2012), unless they truly
aim to make movies the audience will soon forget, so they can simply
remake them again in another twenty years time.
And
watch the trailer here:
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