Total Recall, while described as a new adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”, should not be called Total Recall. It should be called The Bourne Minority: Attack of the Clones as it tells a story so far from original, derivative isn’t even a fitting descriptor.
Before walking in, anyone with even a passing familiarity with movies over the last 15 years is well aware of the 1990 film of the same name starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Even if your memory of that film is vague, combine it with similar vague memories of history and movies and the film itself serves as its own form of “total recall”. Scenes begin to look familiar to scenes you’ve seen in other movies, plotlines blur with those of the past and the history of the 18th century rears its head once again. To go by the film’s tagline — “What is real?” — I would say everything about Total Recall is fake.
The film begins informing us the past has come back to haunt us. Chemical warfare has left the majority of the planet uninhabitable, only the United Federation of Britain and Australia (referred to as the oh-so-clever “Colony”) remain. The privileged reside in a Minority Report-esque Britain while the rest of society is exiled to the Blade Runner-esque Colony. Sound familiar?
Every day, workers from The Colony storm through the center of the Earth to Britain where they are building an army of mechanized police officers or, as I like to call them, clones for the Empire. Meanwhile, rebel forces from The Colony are rising to defeat their ruling overlords. In this scenario Bryan Cranston plays Darth Vader — determined to use his robots to destroy the rebellion — Bill Nighy is something of a Yoda and then we get to Colin Farrell as Douglas Quaid or, to continue the Star Wars metaphor, Obi Wan Kenobi (the Ewan McGregor one, not Alec Guinness), though he is actually this film’s Jason Bourne.
When we first meet Douglas Quaid he’s a lowly factory worker, heading through the core with his buddy Harry (Bokeem Woodbine) to build robots on the other side. Douglas, however, has been having bad dreams lately where he’s attacked by said robots and running around with the lovely Jessica Biel. Perhaps it’s these dreams or something else that is causing him to want more from life, but he finds himself drawn to Rekall, a company that manufactures memories for its clients and Douglas can’t help but give it a shot, but that’s when everything goes wrong.
Seemingly before the procedure can even be completed a series of events are triggered that send Douglas on the run, chased by the woman (Kate Beckinsale) he’s called his wife for the last seven years. Who is Douglas Quaid? Who, indeed.
Like something straight out of The Bourne Identity (or pretty much the exact same thing as The Bourne Identity), Douglas finds passports and documents indicating a former life in a safe deposit box, he’s chased through the streets in flying cars and runs into security problems that finds him reunited with Melina (Biel), a woman that knows him but he doesn’t know her. Lucky for him the robots he’s helped build can’t aim to save their mechanized lives. I don’t know who designed the targeting systems in the world’s future police force, but they need some serious improving.
From here there is plenty more chasing, plenty more Quaid doubting who he is, plenty more Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, Bourne, Minority Report and Blade Runner references up to and including every action film cliche you can imagine.
Director Len Wiseman is clearly taken to the lens flares J.J. Abrams has been using in films such as Star Trek and Super 8 as this film is loaded with the blinding lights, which is just one more example of how unimaginative the entire thing is.
Harry Gregson Williams provides a pounding score that dominates most of the film and cinematographer Paul Cameron goes back to the whiz bang filmmaking you’ll recognize from his work on Gone in 60 Seconds and Swordfish.
There are a few nods to the original here such as a passing reference to Mars, the three-breasted woman and a comical nod to Schwarzenegger’s secret identity as an overweight red head that gets stuck saying “two weeks”, but this only continues to prove how this film has zero identity of its own. It’s a mash-up of films from the past and anyone could have done it. I can’t help but wonder what Len Wiseman did on set other than to show clips from old films and say, “Do that.”
If while watching Total Recall you get bored or feel you’re watching a cover band destroying the idea of what it means to pay homage to the hits, you’re not alone. This is a film that can’t even be described as poorly conceived, it’s a shoddily constructed patchwork quilt sewn together with a stapler.
