“Total Recall” (2012) came out amid a glut of sci-fi remakes, and it did not supplant the 1990 original in the public’s consciousness. Judging by the poster and perhaps thinking of Colin Farrell from “Minority Report,” I imagined this as one of those gray, interchangeable dystopias.
Visually impressive
But that’s not quite accurate. The production design by Patrick Tatopoulos is so luscious – a colorful, oddly inviting drabness that’s closer to “Blade Runner” than “Minority Report” — that if the story was up to the same standard, “Total Recall” would be a classic.
Tatopoulos is a tough artist to pin down in my mind, because he worked on both the masterful “Dark City” and the mediocre “Godzilla” in 1998, around the time he was breaking out, and his list of credits does lean slightly toward the level of the latter example.
“Total Recall” (2012)
Director: Len Wiseman
Writers: Kurt Wimmer, Mark Bomback, Ronald Shusett
Stars: Colin Farrell, Bokeem Woodbine, Bryan Cranston
But “Dark City” is a visual masterpiece, and “Total Recall” is too. Other than the “Blade Runners,” this is the best-looking Philip K. Dick adaptation, with its striking vistas of multi-level cities wherein the ground level features canals, traditional wheeled traffic, pedestrian crowds and a general sense of uncleanliness.
This high-tech-yet-rundown late-21st-century Earth owes a lot to “Blade Runner,” which also features multiple levels. But that film relied on matte paintings and composited shots. “Total Recall” shows us a living, functioning world. Highlights include Quaid (Farrell) being chased on foot through one of the floating levels by his nemesis Lori (Kate Beckinsale), and later Quaid and ally Melina (Jessica Biel, “Next”) being pursued through a maze of transport cubes that move both vertically and horizontally.
Fascinating tech
Meanwhile, the synthetic police officers call to mind “I, Robot,” another Tatopoulos project. But I hadn’t seen anything quite like The Fall, the elevator train that takes commuters from The Colony (Australia) to the British Federation (Europe). At the Earth’s core, the gravity gets reversed, and it’s a great setting for a zero-G shootout.
Oh, and in this future you can have a phone in your hand. I mean implanted in your hand. That’s a little more convenient than Rick Deckard’s reliance on vidphone booths in his 2019.
I’m obsessing over the tech and infrastructure because, well, we already know the story. In 1990’s “Total Recall,” director Paul Verhoeven got so caught up in the silliness of a bad guy who is unknowingly undercover as a good guy that he went right up to the line of campiness, and arguably over the line, with Arnold Schwarzenegger playing along.
Sober treatment of the story
Director Len Wiseman, whose whole resume is remakes and franchises, treats the material in more sober fashion. But screenwriters Kurt Wimmer and Mark Bomback basically tell the same story as the 1990 film (which was inspired by PKD’s “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”).
For a dash of freshness, they add neat details that take advantage of modern action stunts and special effects. And they give us the requisite nods to the original such as the three-breasted woman and a twist on the hero’s checkpoint-scanner trickery.
I like the actors well enough, but their characters are boilerplate. Especially drawing the short straw – but probably a nice paycheck — is “Breaking Bad’s” Bryan Cranston as the evil Cohaagen. He’s in the global power-grabber mold. He has the people of The Colony essentially dig their own graves by building the synthetic cops at their factory jobs, and his coup de grace is a false flag terrorist attack.
Not such a bad place
“Total Recall” includes talk of overpopulation in this future where only two chunks of the planet are livable (another similarity to “Blade Runner,” where the Earth is polluted and covered in wastelands). The low-paid Quaid at one point sarcastically calls his Colony apartment a “castle,” but we see it has a TV that covers a whole wall and a fridge that doubles as an electronic message board.
Quality of living is relative throughout time, I guess, because this future doesn’t seem too terrible on a day-to-day basis. It’s a police state, sure, but not much more of one than in the present-day USA. (By the way, a tip of the hat to this rare American SF film that doesn’t insist on being set in the USA.)
Basically, Quaid has lower middle-class (or upper lower-class) ennui 80 years in the future, and aside from Farrell’s good looks, he’s your standard PKD Sad Sack. The adventure he finds himself in would be striking, except that we’re already familiar with it.
Still, “Total Recall” is a production design feast that brings a PKD world to life, standing on the shoulders of “Blade Runner” and reaching higher with modern moviemaking techniques.