150 Word Review: 'Total Recall' (1990)
Get your ass to Mars
Dutch director Paul Verhoeven what Americans want: blood, fire, boobs.
His Total Recall serves two masters: the famed sci-fi author Philip K. Dick and the musclebound action star Arnold Schwarzenegger. The movie is a mindbending race from Earth to Mars that takes place in a bleak corporate future where nobodies can purchase memories of luxury vacations.
When we meet Schwarzenegger's character, he's a working-class schlub married to Sharon Stone. Or is he? After paying for an interplanetary getaway that lives in his dreams, he wakes up hunted by a reptilian Michael Ironside, with a killer's instinct to use civilians as human shields.
Total Recall’s special effects still pop, especially the mix of miniatures and animatronics. Mars is a fully realized underground police state, characterized by a stark division between the haves and mutant have-nots, where the authorities can control the air. Verhoeven keeps things lurid and gory, clever and brain-dead.
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Just wrote a post on reimagining Total Recall for the streaming age.
This was by far the scariest film I saw as a kid and it took me forever to revisit it as an adult. Upon a rewatch it was still violent and scary but it also looked amazing + I think I could finally understand how it was a good use of both Schwarzenegger and Stone at the time, as actors but also symbols. It lowkey became one of my favorites.