TOTAL RECALL
With Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rachel Ticotin, Sharon Stone, Ronny Cox, Michael Ironside, Mel Johnson Jr., and Marshall Bell.
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Alien (1979) revitalized the claustrophobic horror-film dynamics of The Thing (1951), internalizing the monstrous and echoing David Cronenberg’s feature of 1975, They Came From Within. Blade Runner (1982), probably the most visually handsome SF effort since 2001, had the merit of making the sordid, dystopian future–unlike the present in most Hollywood pictures–seem lived in, and gave us attractive androids, objects that helped reformulate the ideology of sexuality. The Terminator (1984) built upon both of these ideas; it established Arnold Schwarzenegger as an iconographic axiom in the heavy-metal android division, and it posited that a plausible happy ending could only be set in a postnuclear future. Finally, Robocop (1987), seeming equally indebted to Blade Runner and The Terminator, streamlined both into a vehicle for violent action spiced with cynical satire about the moral ugliness of the Reagan era.
Doug Quaid (Schwarzenegger), a construction worker with a devoted wife (Sharon Stone) on Earth in the year 2084, suffers from recurring nightmares set on Mars, where he appears in the company of a mysterious woman (Rachel Ticotin).
This should give you an idea of how jam-packed and complicated the plot is even at the beginning. And though the movie features almost continuous violent, bone-crunching action while dosing out its multifaceted exposition, director Paul Verhoeven shows remarkable grace and lucidity, keeping everything in perpetual motion without landing the viewer in total confusion. There’s just the right amount of alienated displacement to conjure up the paranoid mood of Philip K. Dick’s 1966 short story, “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” which served as the basis for the script, but still enough straight-ahead, slam-bang action to satisfy the violence freaks who couldn’t care less about plot or satire. (Verhoeven’s previous features The 4th Man and Robocop seem to indicate that good-natured malice and sadistic violence are his main calling cards, and these are distributed liberally to male and female characters alike.)
“You are what you do,” remarks the revolutionary leader Kuato (Marshall Bell)–a mutant encased within the body of another mutant named George; “a man’s described by his actions, not his memory.” It’s an existential credo given a troubling spin by the suggestion that Quaid’s attempts to fulfill Hauser’s instructions to defeat Cohaagen may be little more than manipulation at Cohaagen’s own hands–a metaphysical conceit that recalls the paradoxes of John Boorman’s Zardoz (1974), and raises the possibility that the whole movie itself may be a dream or memory implant, right down to the corny religious lighting of the grand finale (which is in many ways closer to De Mille than Spielberg). But is it Quaid’s dream or Quaid’s memory implant, or our own? With freedom and identity both matters of such perpetual doubt that not even a Schwarzenegger hero can circumvent it, the only thing one can really do is sit back and enjoy the show for what it is, expensive air and all.
