Total Recall - Movie Review (Mild Spoilers)

While waiting for a really good sci-fi movie to appear this year (Prometheus was good and John Carter was okay) I decided to be a bit optimistic and put Total Recall into that category of excellent Sci-fi movies.  Despite some dire reviews, I hoped that maybe the film would have an intelligent story and perhaps the reviewers were just missing Arnie.

Some great visuals

I will say that the film looked pretty good.  Oh, No!! If I start a review with this it usually means the story is bad.  Anyhow, the effects and whole look of the film is certainly Blade Runner like to a high degree.  It even rains quite often in the film.   I am sure it would be great to see what the city and those effects would look like once the Blu-Ray comes out where you can slow it down and pause the scenes.  You may have trouble seeing it in the theaters because the movie moves very fast.

The fast moving action could have been pretty neat if it wasn’t formatted like a video game.  We have our hero being chased through the cluttered and rainy city.  He will jump from building to building and over vehicles and so on.  Then he will hop in a hover car and take part in a high speed chase along those cool magnetic rails.  Then you need to maneuver your way through a complex maze of elevator shafts.  All of these seemed more like a video game design than a movie.  Perhaps only one or two of these might have been okay.

I think this was Colin Farrell and he played someone in the film

Wait a minute, what about the characters?  Surely the characters in this movie will be more fleshed out than the cheesy 80’s film with Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Not really.  There is actually very little time in this movie where we see any of these characters develop.  So not only does the movie move fast but it includes characters we don’t care about.

More great visuals...... oh yea, the explosion was cool too.

Okay…. Well, the story has got to be the saving part here, right?  Well, no.  The idea that one can dream another life is interesting and is looked at to a degree in this film but it seems to come up short.  At least in the original there was quite a bit of twist identities for the characters.  This version is more cut and dry and you really don’t buy into “it is all a dream” or “you are not a spy” ideas.

Getting into a quick nitpick, the elevator going from one side of the Earth to the other is interesting but is undermined by a couple of scenes.  At one point our heroes are outside the elevator just as it is slowing down.  Really?  This thing must be going really fast to go through the Earth in 15 minutes.  Our heroes would not be able to go outside the elevator at that speed.  Also, the technology to build such an elevator is probably more complex (or impossible) than finding a way to clean up the devastated world or at least create a form of transportation on the surface of the Earth or even more realistic, an orbital transportation system that will get them back and forth in a matter of a couple of hours.  Later in the movie we actually see transportation and people living outside in the wasteland.

Anyhow, I was definitely missing the whole Mars part of the original movie.  I can certainly buy the entire story being shifted to Earth for this remake but it really didn’t seem to work as well as it could have.

Don't drive angry Kate.

Anything good in the film?   Well, like I said before, the look of the film is pretty good and the effects are excellent.  Kate Beckinsale is impressive as the persistent agent who wants nothing more to kill Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell).  Even still, her part gets ridiculous and she eventually comes off as The Coyote going after the Road Runner.

So for a movie that I hoped would be a good sci-fi movie, it wasn’t even close and for a movie that had to be better than the campy original, it wasn’t.

Even Maroney McKayla was unimpressed!