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Have you
ever had that recurring dream where you’re caught in the middle of
an intergalactic
conspiracy on Mars; everyone is trying to kill you, and you’re not sure whether you’re
a spy, a revolutionary, or a revolutionary spy? Then things get as Freudian as an
exploding rocket ship in a cave, when a three-breasted prostitute starts checking you
out? Well, now thanks to new memory implant technology provided by the Rekall
Corporation, you can!
This is the premise of the mind-bending, sci-fi,
action extravaganza, Total
Recall.
The film centers on
mild-mannered but ultra-buff construction worker, Douglas Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger)
who dreams of visiting Mars. Lori (Sharon Stone), his wife, however, isn’t too keen on
the idea (probably wanting to keep Arnie, er, Doug away from those three-breasted women),
so he opts to take a virtual vacation via memory chip. Enter the mind-bendiness, as Quaid
wakes up (while still dreaming) to a seriously Talking Heads moment: “This is not my
beautiful house. / This is not my beautiful wife.” He’s dragged into the action-packed
interstellar intrigue of a Martian conspiracy, complete with a fresh air monopoly,
revolutionary mutants, an ancient alien race, and Quaid trying to outwit himself as his
own double-agent.
Total Recall is a cult-classic based on the short
story, “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” by sci-fi scribe, Philip K. Dick, who also
inspired the definitive techno-noir cult classic, Blade Runner and the recent
Report.
Dick, whose sci-fi stories act as a vehicle for
philosophical quandaries, may have preferred the film in the hands of the originally
scheduled director David Cronenberg, whose mind-bendy works have included Naked
Lunch,
eXistenZ, and Spider over the more action-splatter-oriented
Paul Verhoeven of Robocop and Starship Troopers fame — but with lines
like: “If I’m not me, den who da hell am I?” perhaps it can be argued that Quaid is
really just expressing Socrates’ “The unexamined life is not worth
living.”
For card-carrying sci-fi dorks like me, who earn their merit
through observing inane trivia, tributes including props to the classic Edgar Rice
Burrough’s, Martian Chronicles and references to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy (wrapping a towel on your head to avoid being found, as well as
the excessively cordial robot that inspired Johnnycab), Total Recall is
unquestionably cult-worthy.
