Total Recall (2012)

Please don't remake Scanners, though.

The Total Recall remake it out now. A Robocop remake is going to be released next year. All we need is a reboot of Starship Troopers and the Paul Verhoeven Sci-fi Trilogy will be all ruined!

Nah, just kidding. I actually liked this Total Recall about as much as I liked the original. The original had decent action scenes, really cool set designs and costumes, and some interesting sci-fi concepts. The new one matches those strengths beat-for-beat, and aside from trying to be a bit too serious, measures up to the original.

For those not in the know, Total Recall is the story of Douglas Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger/Colin Farrell), a lowly labourer having a boring life with his absurdly hot wife. For some reason, he is not satisfied in his life and finds himself drawn to news about the conflict between the evil authority and the rebels of the colony. He sees news for a company called Rekall, which sells virtual vacations in the form of lifelike memories inserted right into the mind of the customer, and decides to try it out. However, in the aftermath of the procedure, he finds out that in truth he is a secret agent gone rogue who has been captured and fed with false memories of being a labourer to keep him down. He embarks on a quest to find the truth about himself, and save the colony from its evil oppressors.

The major story differences between the versions are the following: in the original, the colony is in Mars, while in the remake it's in Australia (connected via an elevator that passes straight through the core of the Earth); in the original, the bad guys are an evil corporation, while in the remake they're the government; in the original, the added intrigue of the plot comes from secret Martian technology and mutants, while in the remake it comes from the evil government having robot soldiers and the politics of the situation; the original has the villain's right hand man Richter (Michael Ironside) as the secondary bad guy, while the remake promotes Quaid's fake wife Lori (Sharon Stone/Kate Beckingsale) to fill this role.

The remake puts a lot of effort right from the start into making the viewer believe Quaid is unsatisfied with his life on some strange level he's not able to explain. I really like that, though what I don't like is the fact that instead of having really vague dreams about being in the colony, he has really specific dreams about the exact circumstances of being captured by the state, which removes all ambiguity about whether or not the whole movie is just a dream.

Another thing they do their damn best to sell is the world. The opening info dump is a bit ham-handed, but makes sense (aside from a later, really weird scene that implies that London is an irradiated wasteland, even though Britain is among the only places in the world that's habitable), and then there's the set design. The establishing shots of the Colony and Britain look too similar for my tastes, but the actual streets of the countries look so radically different, with the hovercar highways and the floating buildings and whatnot. The roofs and back-alleys of the Colony serve as the locales of some really intense chase scenes that make great use of sets for scripting.

Overall, the first half of the movie has really good action, while the ending falls short on this. The previously-mentioned chases at the Colony and a fantastically tense extended action scene involving futuristic elevators were my definite favourites. The movie's advertising focused a lot on hovercar-chases, but they put all the hovercar-stuff worth seeing into the trailers, so... pointless.

The movie's main problem is its tone. It tries a bit too hard to go for deep emotional drama, which causes its shortcomings on the narrative side to be all the more visible. The girlfriend character is sorta one-note, the evil scheme of the villain makes little sense and the rebels are left really vaguely defined in regards to what they actually do to accomplish their goals. All this would be easily overlookable if the tone was campy and bright.

It's a fine movie, and a worthy remake. The references toward the original were a bit too on-the-nose at times, it's too serious for its own good and it's more straightforward, but other than that, I liked it. Go see it to get your action fill, if you're short on running and gunning right now.

(PS. Throughout this review, I have referred to the 1990 film as "the original". I know both movies are adaptations of a novel.)

(PPS. There is a three-breasted woman in the remake. So if you only want to see an update on that, good for you.)