Ah, Arnold Schwarzenegger at his finest. No joke, Total Recall is one of the best sci-fi movies of my era. Raw, gritty, emotional, human-like. I say human-like because mars is represented as a place infested with villainy and scum, and it's all down to the mega corps (again) taxing the air that the residents breathe keeping them in abject poverty. Heh, I wonder if that will be a thing in the future.
Anyway, we start off with Dennis Quaid and his simple life as a workman. He's married to a lovely woman who was played by the georgeous Sharon Stone at the time. His friends keep him on the straight and narrow. It seems as if Dennis Quaid has a good life.
He's always wanted to go to Mars though, and always has a weird dream about Mars that ends up with him dying on Mars with a woman that he doesn't know. Nevertheless against his wife and friends advice he goes to a chip implant centre that will give him the memories of being a secret agent spy on mars. He thinks that would be great.
Unknown to everyone though is that Dennis Quaid has actually been to mars before and has a deep intertwining history with the megacorps there. The guys at the chip implant centre find out and dump his body because they don't want to be involved with all that.
That's when the craziness starts to happen. His friends try to kill him, but he ends up killing his friends, and then his wife tries to kill him too - which he escapes.
The rest of the film is him trying to find out who he is and why he was placed on Earth with his memory wiped.
I wish they made films like this still. It was raw, it was gritty, and it had all the typical Arnie cliche's in it too. Ah, 1990, what a time to be alive.
Crazy that I was 10 when I watched this, because I would absolutely in no way let my son watch this at that age. Not even at the age he is now. Not on his nelly. But times were different back then, people were harder, and kids weren't watched as much.
But that shouldn't take away from the fact that this film is just as watchable today as it was 30 years ago. In fact it's probably more watchable now because we've actually landed on mars already in real life -- quite the apt film to watch.
It really does make you wonder though. If say life on Mars becomes a thing one day in the distant future, how would the oxygen be made/transported there and who would own it? And is this film just a precursor of the corruption to come when it actually becomes a reality, because it eventually will.
I mean of course this film was just an action film and I doubt we were ever meant to think of it more than "Arnie pulls out gun, bad guys go boom boom" but I think it does beg the question that when we do reach Mars, because that's all the rich guys are trying to do right now with their space rockets -- will it become a den of villainy controlled by the greed of corpos and their lust for money and power?
Who knows?
But that aside. 10/10 film, highly watchable (even today) and if you haven't seen it I recommend you go and give it a try!
Posted using CineTV