“If I’m not me, who the hell am I?”
It would be a mistake to view Total Recall as just another of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s exercises in brainless machismo. It falls right smack in the middle of his blockbuster reign and while it looks the part with its proven Arnie action formula, this heinously violent sci-fi adventure is more than a mere assault of testosterone, gunpowder, and prosthetics. It’s got all of that in spades, to be sure, but it pairs the Governator’s charismatic brawn with the brain-tickling concepts of Philip K. Dick and the winking satire and kinetic direction of Paul Verhoeven. As with the director’s RoboCop, Total Recall is a parade of carnage, comic book villains, and cheesy one-liners, but beneath that low-brow surface of raunch and gore there’s an intelligent depth, an earnest questioning of reality involving identity crises and altered states inspired by PKD’s short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”.
The framing device is classic PKD. To open the story, Schwarzenegger is Douglas Quaid, an insanely muscular (but of course) construction worker who otherwise appears to be a fairly normal guy. Oh, well, he’s also married to Sharon Stone, but other than that—normal guy. Problem is, even with a blonde bombshell sleeping in his bed, he’s been having recurring dreams of a mysterious brunette… from Mars. Background newscasts fill us in on the touchy political situation on the red planet, where a small colony of underground mutants wages a battle against the tyrannical governor, Vilos Cohaagen (Ronny Cox). To satisfy his longing for a space voyage, Quaid makes a visit to Rekall, a cutting-edge business that implants memories so detailed that their customers do not question their recollections. And so he finds himself strapped to a chair, injected with a sedative, requesting that he go on a mission as a secret agent and have a fling with a sleazy athletic brunette. But something goes awry with Rekall’s memory machine and Quaid suffers what the technicians call a “schizoid embolism.” To cover their tracks, Quaid is sedated, his memory cleaned up in a rush to erase Rekall’s faulty machine, and plopped in a driverless cab with a wise-cracking robot host.
This immediately provokes questions, but we are not given any time to ponder them as Quaid is attacked on his ride home by a trusted coworker, and forced to kill him and several other goons in self defense. When he reaches his apartment, he’s assaulted by his wife, who tells him that his life as he knows it is based on implanted memories; she’s not actually his wife, they’ve only known each other for a few weeks, etc. After narrowly escaping from Richter (Michael Ironside), Quaid is given a briefcase containing money, gadgets, identification papers, and a video message from Hauser, a military commander played by Schwarzenegger. The message explains that he had previously been in cahoots with Cohaagen, the cruel ruler of Mars. The two came to a disagreement over the discovery of an alien artifact and he had escaped the Agency by erasing his own memory. Now, under the guidance of his past self, he must travel to Mars and overthrow his old boss.
And just like that we’re into sublime Dickian territory. Is Quaid lying unconscious and dreaming on the table at Rekall, living out the implanted memory? Or is this actually happening? Did Rekall’s tampering trigger suppressed memories? Is he Hauser or Quaid? Why did he already have memories of Mel (Rachel Ticotin), a prostitute in Mars’ red light district that Hauser instructs him to track down? The editing and storytelling carefully avoid answering any questions outright, allowing audience members to draw their own conclusions. The trippiest moment comes when Dr. Edgemar (Roy Brocksmith) knocks on the door of Quaid’s Mars hotel. Calmly, he explains that the entire ordeal is taking place inside Quaid’s mind. He’s a representative of Rekall, inserted into Quaid’s dream to help him navigate his way out of the miscalculated memory implant. “Are you really convinced that you’re an invincible secret agent from Mars, who is in the middle of an interplanetary conspiracy to make him think that he’s a lowly construction worker?” He brings in Quaid’s wife as proof and offers him a pill that represents his desire to return to reality—take it, and everything goes back to normal. Refuse and he may be lobotomized. It’s then that we’re given a moment to reflect and realize that the entire plot since Quaid submitted himself to Rekall has taken the exact shape of the memory package he had selected. Even though Quaid/Hauser blows a hole through the doctor’s forehead, an answer still evades him, and this apprehensive ambiguity is carried through to the conclusion.
The heady material gives Total Recall some depth, but if we set aside the frame, it is also one of the most gloriously campy blood-and-guts extravaganzas of its era. Bullet-riddled bodies fall left and right, Stone’s character is executed along with a silly one-liner, bystanders are used as human shields, eyeballs bulge in the vacuum of space, Schwarzenegger pulls a golf ball-sized tracking device out of his nostril, the mutant leader is a slimy psychic infant that has grown out of the belly of a man. Most of Quaid’s time spent on Mars is in the vicinity of Venusville, a neon hangout for a veritable freakshow of triple-breasted women, machine gun-toting midgets, and variations on “brain grew outside the skull.” (The mutant backdrop was the work of David Cronenberg, who was involved with the project early on but eventually left over some disagreements with the producers.) Like RoboCop, the unflinching depiction of carnage in Total Recall was originally given an X rating and had to be carefully whittled down to achieve a downgrade to R.
There are also some slick, seamless instances of early CGI, including a tricky hologram device used in firefights and a bizarre scene where Quaid tries to slip through Mars’ customs using a robotic headpiece that makes him look like a chubby woman. A superbly realized miniature is used to represent the Martian landscape. Overall it’s a splendid effects package that would outdo most other witless action films even if the mind-bending frame story were absent. And I think it’s important to consider that within that frame story, the outrageous slaughter actually makes sense. The Rekall experience is designed to allow average joes to fulfill their fantasies of Hollywood heroics, so a fantasy where Quaid gets to be James Bond in space is a logical request.
Total Recall remains a compulsively rewatchable film. The primal appeal of Schwarzenegger’s brawny action, Philip K. Dick’s reality-probing premise, and the violent satire of Verhoeven—it’s a winning recipe that has aged quite well.