Total Recall Review

I was only 7 years old when my mom and her boyfriend dragged me to see this movie. My mom was awesome, she had no major filter, she let me watch whatever, and this Rated R movie was just another piece to my childhood, and it allowed me to blossom into the little horror fan that I used to be, and the big horror idiot that I am now. Total Recall is a classic, it has a better plot than Inception,a nd features some great moments for both horror movie fans and science fiction fans alike.

Arnold Schwarzenegger stars in this movie alongside some other people, but who cares right? This movie was based on a story by Philip Dick and was loose on plot after it was introduced. The main focus of the film concerns a construction worker, tired of his life away from Mars and wants to get back to the Red planet, but when his wife doesn't let him, he goes to a dream factory in which he can get a memory implant to let him become a Mars resident and super spy. When the implant doesn't work out and his repressed memory comes to the forefront of his mind, the movie goes out of control with a secret police chasing him, and the movie's plot gets wilder and more unpredictable.

The first major piece of this movie that I loved was the interactions of Doug Quaid (Arnold) and Sharon Stone. The fight scene that they have was quite good, and Sharton Stone is hot! The two have a nice fight in their apartment, and then things get better and better as Arnold runs throughout Earth and eventually to mars. The second piece that I enjoyed was the gore. There was a lot of gore in this movie, with some nice fights, gun play, explosions, and even a head exploding!

There is some nudity, and some interesting sexual points, but nothign too much. The three breasted alien lady was a nice little touch in the mid point of the film, even if it was an after thought of the Alien bar.

The rest of the film is relatively predictable, and msot of it just ends up being a little boring, but not before the one liners get ramped up more and more. Including the famous line where Arnold's character takes a huge drill to a tank and yells out, "SCREW YOU", getting the driver into a bloody mess inside the cockpit of the rover-drill.

I hate the whole identity crisis thing, and it's something that I've written about in the past on this blog. Memory repression, lack of memory, and the same thing that plagued Inception for me, is found here. I never liked it, and I still don't like. While I am ok with it here, I hate how lazy it is in story telling and it's one of the over used tricks of the trade.

Visually, this film is very appealing, even after all these years. There are some very stupid graphics, there are some terrible one liners, but the over the top violence, chase sequences, editing, and musical score made this one a great overall cool film to watch. It's funny to note that this film got an X-rating, but was later given an R rating.

I love how the filming of the film happened in Mexico City (which is one of my home towns) and the subway did in fact look much more futuristic than I am used to. The movie did so well at the box office that they wrote a second film and it was never filmed, it later became Minority Report, which no one cared for or watched.

Total Recall has its flaws. I did find myself laughing at several non-comedic points. However, I liked the picture of the future, and I really loved watching Sharon Stone (a much younger one). Arnold's one liners aren't as comedic as they were much later in his career, and the violence, gore, and plot points come at you fast and easy. I found myself wanting to see the special features on this disc, but instead, I just watched it again with a bag of popcorn. Total Recall is best viewed in blu ray here.




Bonus!



I recently enjoyed playing the Total Recall video game for the NES 8-Bit system. I love the NES and this game is challenging, and similar to Contra on some levels. You play as Doug Quaid rolling through different levels and fight off villains. There are a lot of crappy points in this game, but it's worth checking out if you're into Nintendo. They also made a game for the Commodore 64, and good luck if you loved that game. The NES game got some terrible reviews, but screw them, this game rules. You can buy Total Recall for the NES here.

They also made a one shot comic book series that adapted the story well. DC Comics published it in the early 90's, but most recently news broke that they would be reviving the Total Recall franchise first with comic books, than with a new reboot, albeit, nothing has surfaced about a release date. It can't possibly live up to how awesome this original film was.