It's interesting to think what would have happened to this had Philip K. Dick's short story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale been given a more intellectual makeover, ala Blade Runner and Minority Report. Instead Paul Verhoeven made it and the style is, shall we say, more of his own. I can think of no director alive today who can portray violent bloody deaths as cold and as senselessly as Verhoeven, and as such his all-action, all-explosion, all-the-time direction is put to good use following Arnie's character Douglas Quaid as he attempts to escape his pursuers, find out his true identity and solve the burning secret that is buried somewhere underneath the Mars Pyramid mine.
Employed as a construction worker in a near-future Earth where Mars has been colonized and used as a source of materiel in a war between the Northern and Southern hemispheres, Quaid is plagued by nightmares of Mars and a feeling that there is something more, something greater out there for him. His wife (Sharon Stone), his fellow workers, all try to dissuade him from this belief but his curiousity is too great and so he goes to Total Rekall, a company which specialises in implanting memories. However, half-way through the procedure something goes horribly wrong, and Quaid awakens in a cab with no knowledge of his trip to Rekall. Upon exiting the cab he is attacked by his former workers and realises that he is indeed part of something far more serious than he ever dreamed. From here he is pursued by the villainous Richter, is double-crossed by friends and family and is constantly challenged as to what is real and what is fake.
Under the surface of this film there is definitely something far more cerebral at work, and one can't help but feel that Verhoeven suppresses this in order to produce a far slicker and more intense movie than would otherwise have been possible. After all, Blade Runner was panned by critics and movie-goers alike upon its release and Dick's twisting 'what is fantasy-what is reality' story left plenty of scope for a director to balls up in. Taking the rules he had applied so succesfully in RoboCop, produce a fast-moving action movie with lots of eye candy and let the audience work out for themselves any moral dilemmas or plot twists, Verhoeven manages to impressively twist his desire for bloody violence around a well-formed plot which uses an on-form Schwarzenegger to maximum effect. A hefty nod must also go to the art and production design teams for creating a future-earth which is quickly coming true, video phones, self-driving cars, outer-space mining and of course, extreme terrorist action. Sure, they got that side a bit wrong, but which pre-9/11 Hollywood movie hasn't? (see Richie's Battlefield Earth review for further confirmation) |
