Just finished watching the Total Recall today for the umpteenth time and I realized that during my previous screening of the movie I missed a subtle twist in the movie which quite changed my view about it this time. Having said that, the Total Recall remains quite enjoyable even now.
In this Schwarzenegger Sci-Fi flick, he plays Doug Quaid who is a construction worker in a near future world. He has a beautiful wife Lori, played by Sharon Stone. Douglas Quaid is haunted by a recurring dream about a journey to Mars. To find our the meaning of these nightmares, he signs up for a memory implant program with a company called Rekall. But something goes wrong with the memory implantation and he remembers being a secret agent fighting against the evil Mars administrator Cohaagen.
The movie is based on a short story by Philip K. Dick (1974) and had quite a difficult time putting it on the silver screen. Ten drafts were written. Various production companies came into play and went out of business, so did various actors. However, somehow Arnold Schwarzenegger managed to convince Carolco into picking up the project for him with Director Paul Verhoeven.
First time I watched Total Recall, I was quite convinced that Quaid was actually a secret agent in his past who agreed to play a mole in order to get hold of the elusive mutant leader Kuato. But today, while watching the movie I picked up a little piece of information during the beginning of the movie that changed my opinion about it entirely. While in Rekall for the first time, during the process of the memory implant, if you follow the monologue of the assistant Ernie while Dr Lull is talking to Doug after handing a vial to Ernie, you would hear him say:
"That's a new one, blue sky on Mars!"
And on the monitor, while seeing the options that Doug can have for his ego trip, we can see a set of domes which have an eerie similarity with the alien reactor that we see in the later part of the movie. So we can say that the entire movie was what Doug went through in his ego trip while sitting at the chair at Rekall as a part of his ego trip, he was not Hauser, he was simply Doug.
Nonetheless, inspite of all these interpretations, this movie will not only make you think, it would take you for a thrill ride, especially with its amazing visual effects (yes, at 1990 those effects were indeed amazing) by Rob Bottin (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Mission: Impossible). And Verhoeven, along with his scriptwriting team consisting of Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett (Alien series) never let us go very long without another plot twist, most of which force a reinterpretation of the material that went before. The twists occur about once per every ten minutes, if not more frequently.
Overall, Total Recall is simply fantastic. A must watch for lovers of the Sci-Fi genre.
