Screenhead

I can’t help but be just a little amazed by the special edition release of Total Recall on DVD, thanks to the Schwartzenegger Collection from Lions Gate.  I was downright surprised to see that science fiction from the really early nineties, like as in 1990, can actually still look like science fiction and not like horribly out of date sludge.

This time, Arnold plays a construction worker on Earth who’s always wondered about Mars.  Though Mars is a war zone of rebellion and corruption, Douglas Quaid has always longed to go.  One day, he sees an ad for a company called Rekall, which promises the best vacation you can ever remember having by implanting the memory directly in your mind.  When Quaid goes to Rekall, he starts a series of events that’ll take him back to Mars, where he discovers that he’s not the person he believes he is, but that the person he once was isn’t the person he wants to be any more.  And along the way, he’ll root out conspiracies on a planetary scale and fight to save a planet from enslavement and suffocation.

There’s a lot to like here–plenty of action and halfway decent science fiction, plus some drama and a few laughs along with some really great mindgames.  I have to respect a movie that’s willing to play a game or two with its audience’s minds–that means they think enough of us to make us THINK about what we’re seeing, nice and objective-like.  It’s really interesting to see what you can do with a spy thriller set on another planet.

That having been said, I’ll advise you that I’ve never actually read Philip K. Dick’s piece We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, so I have no real knowledge of how close the movie is to the book.  From what I can tell, however, up until about the last ten, twenty minutes or so the two are at least fairly similar.

Time may have been inordinately kind to Total Recall, but nineteen years make a difference to just about anything.  For instance, take a look at a lot of the electronics around the futuristic Martian base–they’re not made by Toshiba or Sanyo or even Sony.  No, Mars bought American, and bought heavily from Curtis Mathes.  I can’t recall the last time I saw a Curtis Mathes item available outside of a garage sale.

The interesting thing is, even those things which would date Total Recall don’t really get in the way.  The videoconferencing telephones look believable enough, the digging machines look EXACTLY like the kind of things that would bore through large quantities of rock, and I can completely buy that this kind of sleazy activity would be going on on a mining colony operation. The special effects aren’t really that dated, not even Ahhh-nuld’s gutteral random cries of his early career really aren’t that bad.

Total Recall is a great reminder of what we used to enjoy in science fiction, and an excellent object lesson in the kind of science fiction we can still enjoy to this very day.  The special edition version, of course, comes with all sorts of featurettes and assorted whatnot–including a commentary track recorded by Schwartzenegger himself, which is a really rather rare thing.

Rent it or buy it, Total Recall will leave you glad you came.  And it’s definitely worth remembering.

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