Total Recall (2012) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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If you can dream it, be it–and then get your ass to Mars.

Total Recall, 2012-edition, presents a story about a man who is uncertain of his future because he is uncertain of his past. This film stands apart from the original version mainly due to its darker tone and its inability to create a memorable remake. Unfortunately, many of the talented cast are wasted on a lackluster script and a mediocre adaptation of the source material.

First Impressions

In what appears to be a remake of Total Recall mashed up with I, Robot, Colin Farrell takes over the lead of a man whose life is not what he believes it to be. He lives in a dystopian world where the visit to a place called Rekall breaks his brain. His wife is now a ruthless killer out to murder him. He’s on the run from the police. And he has fighting skills that he never knew he had. What do you remember about this version of Total Recall?

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

Several title cards explain how the end of the 21st Century brought global chemical warfare, making much of the planet uninhabitable. All that is left is the United Federation of Britain (UFB) and The Colony (made up of areas in Australasia), which are connected by The Fall, an elevator which passes through the core of the planet connecting the two nations. Workers from the poorer Colony make the trip daily to factories in the UFP building synthetic Federal Police officers. Doug Quaid (Colin Farrell) is one of these men. He lives with his wife, Lori (Kate Beckinsale), in near poverty, and often has terrible dreams of another woman. One evening, he has a drink with his co-worker and friend, Harry (Bokeem Woodbine), where he expresses his displeasure with his life.

Doug visits Rekall, a company that can implant false memories of better times. He chooses a package where he’s an undercover secret agent. Just as the technicians start the procedure, security forces burst in and Doug guns them all down to his surprise. Shocked, he runs home, where Lori attacks and tries to kill him. While running through the streets of The Colony, Doug’s hand lights up, and he accepts a call from someone named Hammond (Dylan Scott Smith) who tells him he’s being tracked and to cut the phone out of his hand.

With some additional info, Doug heads to the bank, finding money, passports, and a note to himself. He sneaks into the UFB and discovers an apartment belonging to Carl Hauser, which he finds out is his original name. A video from Carl (Ethan Hawke) explains that he had been working against the Resistance with UFB Chancellor Cohaagen (Bryan Cranston). Lori and her team of soldiers pursue Doug, and he escapes with the help of the mysterious woman from his dreams, Resistance officer Melina (Jessica Biel). Melina offers proof of who she is by showing a scar that matches the one on Doug’s hand.

The police surround the building they are in. Harry enters the lobby and explains to Doug that he is still in the chair at Rekall and is having an episode. Everything that is happening right now is part of a failed memory implant, and he’s in danger of dying. Doug thinks hard about the reality he’s experiencing, deciding to kill Harry and run with Melina. Lori continues her pursuit, but they lose her in the maze of three-dimensional elevators in the building. Melina takes Doug to meet her father, Matthias (Bill Nighy), who is also the leader of the Resistance. He lives outside The Colony in the No-Zone, a chemically infected wasteland. They strap Doug to a Rekall-like chair to extract the information needed to stop Cohaagen’s synthetic police force. Cohaagen and his men suddenly arrive. It’s all a trap.

Cohaagen reveals that there is no kill code for the police-bots, and that Hauser has been working for him all the time, before killing Matthias. Just as they are about to reintroduce Hauser’s memories back into Doug’s head, Hammond helps free the secret agent. Cohaagen is in the process of loading 50,000 troops into The Fall so he can invade and take over The Colony. Doug sneaks aboard the gravity elevator and frees Melina. They attempt to stop the invasion by planting explosives around the ship.

The Fall arrives at The Colony, but Malina takes control of an aircraft and shoots most of the bad guys. Cohaagen arrives to fight Doug, but the younger man triumphs, killing the would-be dictator. Doug and Malina get off the vehicle just as the bombs explode, dropping the gravity elevator back into the hole and destroying the synthetic police force onboard. Doug awakens in an ambulance to see Melina, but realizes there’s no scar on her hand. It’s Lori in a holographic face mask. Doug kills his former wife, and he and Melina hug. He notices there is no tattoo on his arm where the Rekall injection was given, leaving him wondering if this is all a dream.

“Everyone seems to know me, but me.” – Quaid/Hauser

History in the Making

Remakes come in two flavors: ones that are better than the original, and Total Recall. That may be overly harsh, but it comes from a recent rewatch of the film, which seems to fail on so many levels. As with the 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger version, both films were based on the 1966 short story by Philip K. Dick, “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.” The 1990 film deviated from the story in several ways, the main one being Arnold Schwarzenegger as the protagonist. It still had the main conceit of a memory implant going wrong, which creates the elements that drive the story forward. He is a secret agent who travels to Mars and becomes the star of his own narcissistic fantasy. The ending was changed to better suit an Arnold action vehicle, as the original story had more of a Twilight Zone style ending. The 2012 version feels like a copy of copy that loses the details, choosing to be a remake of the 1990 film and not giving any credit to Dick.

Film remakes should serve a purpose. A movie should not be remade just for the sake of being remade. It should benefit from a more modern approach, or have something new to say, or even turn a B-level film into A-level material. Total Recall doesn’t seem to aspire to any of that. It follows the same basic plot of a man who is uncertain that the world he’s experiencing is real. In the intervening 22 years between the original version and this one, there have been multiple films that deal with the perceived nature of reality, including The Matrix. The new version spends lots of screen time gaslighting Doug about the nature of his reality. In the scene with Harry trying to convince him that he is hallucinating, everything goes on and on, creating a question for the audience about whether or not the filmmakers knew what they were doing. It strips out all of the fantastical elements, creating another dystopian world with a ruthless leader looking to crush the underclass. There’s little to no humor in this remake, which bogs down the movie with so much angst and tension that it doesn’t seem fun. Even the action scenes feel devoid of any joy. It’s just the characters running through their movements, like a video game. Lori chases Doug, but he escapes to the next level, where Lori again chases Doug. Regardless of how the audience chooses to remember the original, it’s at least a fun film.

Genre-fication

From a genre perspective, Total Recall doesn’t appear to bring anything new to the world. Tonally, it creates a very serious version of the 1990 film. Colin Farrell is tired and exasperated in his life as he yearns for something more. When he kills people, he’s shocked that it was his hand that carried out the deed. He never provides a quippy response to these killings, only an intense stare. Perhaps this vision of the future is meant to shock rather than entice. Visually, Total Recall features lots of lens flares, and is dark, gritty, and colorless, all elements that sci-fi films (and some more mainstream fare) had moved towards in the early 21st Century. Star Trek (and JJ Abrams, in particular) had popularized the use of lens flare. It’s hard to believe that it was once considered bad form to have even a minor lens flare in your film; it was the mark of a poor DP. Dark and gritty films had also been around for a while. You know the future is bad when it looks bad, like in I Am Legend or Children of Men. And colorless, The Book of Eli does that better than anyone else. It’s difficult to look at any portion of this film as unique, as nothing stands out from the status quo.

Total Recall offers some elements of science-fiction that seem required in a futuristic movie such as this. Aside from the fascist dystopian government, which operates with impunity, the film has its share of levitating vehicles. Whether it’s the elevators that move in three dimensions, touching only a wall, floor, or ceiling, or the magnetic-levitation cars that float above the ground or hang suspended from a track, the world has technology for days. They haven’t perfected androids, but are introducing an autonomous police force. This force is being built by the people whom it will oppress, so that is some terrible irony. Holograms, clear panel displays, and a giant elevator that passes through the Earth are only a small fraction of the details audiences are shown that set the future apart from the present. But so many of these elements have been a part of other films. Nothing in this remake of Total Recall stands out as weirdly futuristic in the same way that the Rekall secretary in the original paints her nails with a computer program and a stylus. Much of the roadway chase and the cars are reminiscent of the future tech from Minority Report. A robotic police force that is used to oppress the public was a big part of I, Robot. And oppressing people with their technology is the hallmark of the government’s plans in District 9. The Fall is also ludicrous, on the order of The Core, but perhaps more plausible–since no direct explanation tried to explain the exact technology.

Societal Commentary

The primary theme of this version of Total Recall is about the sense of self. It does a pretty good job of that. Where the Schwarzenegger version seems to forget that it’s trying to provide a story that may or may not only be a dream in the protagonist’s head, this version sticks to that idea wholeheartedly. The second the Rekall fluid is pumped into Quaid’s arm, the new world starts. The end of the film continues to question Quaid’s reality as he realizes he no longer has the peace symbol tattoo on his arm where the needle was plugged in. If that disappeared, then maybe this truly is a dream. But what of Quaid’s dreams of Melina, and his matching scar? If he was dreaming of her before his trip to Rekall, then perhaps he really was mind-wiped, and he has been a secret agent all along. It allows the audience to interpret their own reality within the film.

Regardless of what “really” is happening, the key message is that you are only the person you are now, despite how you’ve behaved in the past. Every moment is a chance to reinvent yourself and change the outcome. Just because you are on the payroll for a dirty fascist industrialist, doesn’t mean that you can’t change your mind and decide to fall in love with the daughter of the leader of the Resistance. In the past, you may have done bad things. You may have killed people for money. Or helped a totalitarian dictator gain power. That’s okay. Because you can burn that entire world down and start again.

The Science in The Fiction

As mentioned above, a lot of the futurism in the film seems built on what has come before. The maglev cars driving along the roads, and the ensuing chase, are probably reminiscent of Minority Report because that’s a main scene where Farrell, as Witwer in that film, chases after Tom Cruise’s character. But these cars have some interesting abilities. I’m not certain why they would need to be able to hover underneath a roadway, connected by their roof, but they have that ability. Perhaps it’s a way to deal with congestion–though the traffic never seems too bad. But by what right-minded engineer would an override that stops the mag-lev from working be created? You’re hovering under a road with nothing below you. There’s an override that you can disable by force. That seems like an item that would institute a recall. Not a total one, but a product one.

The lack of privacy in this future is present, even though attention is not brought to it directly. Most of the computer displays seen are transparent, meaning that other people can always see what’s on the screen (even if it’s backwards). But it would also be so difficult to use one of these if you are constantly seeing everything going on behind the monitor. Phones are also very public. To use the video technology in phones, place your hand on a piece of glass, and you can see the person you’re talking to and a bunch of readouts. That appears to be the default mode, since Cohaagen instructs Lori to “take him off display” so she holds her bare hand to her head, looking less of an idiot, with the palm-interfaced, light-up phone. You think people talking on their phones in public now is irritating? Just wait.

And then, of course, there’s the idea that drilling a hole through the core of the planet is a good idea. For socio-economic reasons that the film doesn’t get into, the UFB is a wealthy area where the future looks bright, and The Colony is a rainy, dark place (like Blade Runner) where all the poor people live. Forget about the fact that even after a chemically run world war, this level of disparity would probably not exist. So to feed the rich, the poor people commute to work, and since “work” is almost 17,000 kilometers away, let’s build a bus that goes through the planet. I can imagine this not working for several reasons, from the molten core destroying the hole and track, to the amount of energy required to run this device multiple times per day would be astronomical. It’s almost as if having Quaid commute to Mars for his job might have been a better idea.

The Final Frontier

The opening credits to the film indicate that Total Recall is released by a company called Original Film, which is quite humorous given that this is the last thing this film is. It was director Len Wiseman’s fourth film, after co-creating the Underworld franchise and directing the first two installments of that, and directing the fourth Die Hard film, Live Free or Die Hard. This was his last directorial film until 2025 when his John Wick spinoff was released, From the World of John Wick: Ballerina. It may seem like Total Recall killed his career, but he had been busy directing and producing television shows such as Sleepy Hollow, Lucifer, The Gifted, and Swamp Thing.

The world of Total Recall has a lot to offer modern audiences and deserves another chance at getting recreated. This version feels as if it’s only going through the motions. It offers tribute to the original in some minor ways, as if expecting the audience to act like the Pointing Rick Dalton meme (Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the television while holding a beer). It includes a three-breasted woman in the seedier area of The Colony. She’s not a mutant, as in the original. Just a woman with an extra mammary gland. The film does get cute when Quaid is trying to sneak into the UFB in his disguise. A heavyset woman is in the foreground and heavily focused on. She is reminiscent of Arnold’s disguise in the 1990 film, and also mentions she’s visiting for “two weeks.” It’s only when the camera racks focus on the character behind her that the audience realizes who Quaid actually is. It’s an amusing moment, but not enough to overshadow the overly prolonged chases and recurring tropes in the remainder of the film.

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