Doug’s wife Lori, played by Sharon Stone, is also a negative presence, leading up to his killer ‘Consider this a divorce’ line. Mars is populated with mutants, with men with brains outside their heads and, famously, three-breasted women one crowd-pleasing effect that gets two encores too many here, although presumably test-audiences dug it. Total Recall’s ugly future was a turn-off at the time, but now seems to reflect man-made entropy and decay in society. The script, with Dan O’Bannon amongst the contributors, seems to look forward to a time when virtual reality is preferable to the real world, and the vision is a grim one.

Total Recall also feels like a video-game, of a type that hadn’t been invented in 1990 exposition–led dialogue leads into each encounter, and a floating-head version of Doug delivering the remit for each mission. This notion of slipping in and out of reality is engagingly played with, with each character announcing themselves with a lie and a cover story, before Doug takes the action cinema route forward. When the action is finally over, and the shooting finally stops, Doug looks up and sees a blue sky on Mars, suggesting that the whole film was an implanted memory that we have experienced, like Doug, as reality. Originally a timid accountant type to be played by Richard Dreyfuss, then Jeff Bridges, central character and construction worker Doug Quaid is hardly a weed when he signs up for an adventure called Blue Sky on Mars, neither he nor we the audience know what to expect. Times have changed, and with a fresh restoration, Total Recall packs more punch than it used to, with a bit of hindsight.Īnd hindsight is important spoiler alert, Verhoeven’s film has a twist ending that radically alters the story that’s unfolded. Not everything about Total Recall chimed first time around it lacked the vehicular action of James Cameron’s Terminator films, the vision of the future wasn’t as persuasive or beautiful as Blade Runner, and some of the action scenes verged on the nasty side.

Both Robocop and Starship Troopers are celebrated works, and this 30 th anniversary edition of Total Recall provides an opportunity to re-assess this adaptation of Phillip K Dick’s novella We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.

A big star vehicle for man of the moment Arnold Schwarzenegger, it was the middle section of three ground-breaking satirical sci-fi movies by Paul Verhoeven. I was a pretty satisfied customer by Total Recall back in 1990.

Total recall schwarzenegger