The haunting what-if scenarios of Black Mirror have been unnerving viewers for over a decade now, but paranoid, dystopian sci-fi stories with shocking twists existed long before the British Prime Minister had sex with a pig on live television in season 1’s “The National Anthem.” The socially conscious terror of Charlie Brooker’s anthology series harks back to the thought-provoking tales of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. The success of Black Mirror has led its initial network home Channel 4 to launch another sci-fi anthology series: Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams.
Instead of telling original stories like Black Mirror, Electric Dreams adapts the existing work of a seminal sci-fi author, Philip K. Dick, whose stories had previously formed the basis for such beloved movie classics as Blade Runner, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly. In 1990, director Paul Verhoeven adapted Dick’s short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” for the big screen with one of the biggest budgets in film history. Total Recall manages to have its cake and eat it, too, doubling as a fun Arnold Schwarzenegger action blockbuster and an intriguing, mind-bending sci-fi movie capturing Dick’s themes of humanity’s fear of technology.
Schwarzenegger stars as Doug Quaid, a blue-collar construction worker in an overpopulated future in which he can’t afford a vacation. One of his co-workers tells him about a company named Rekall that implants memories of vacations in lieu of actually going on them. When Quaid goes down to Rekall’s offices to check out their operation, they tell him they can implant any memory, like being a spy on a covert mission to Mars. Quaid opts for the Martian secret agent memory and halfway through the operation, he comes to and starts ranting and raving about being a spy named Carl Hauser who needs to get back to Mars to complete his mission. So, Rekall’s agents drug him, throw him in the back of a cab, and send him home. There, his wife (Sharon Stone) tells him his cover’s been blown and tries to kill him. Suddenly, he’s a wanted man and he actually does have to go on a covert mission to Mars.
From there, the twists keep coming. Right up until the very end of the movie, the audience is left unclear about how much of what’s happening on-screen is real. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter if Quaid was really a secret agent on Mars or he imagined the whole thing back at Rekall’s headquarters. Verhoeven deftly recontextualized the trippy themes of Dick’s story – technology’s ability to alter our perception of reality – in a visual medium.
Much like Verhoeven’s previous sci-fi satire RoboCop, Total Recall is a lot smarter than it initially appears. On the surface, it’s a goofy Schwarzenegger action movie with the added goofiness of a three-breasted woman. And it certainly satisfies on that front, with plenty of sharp one-liners, hateable bad guys, and suspenseful shootouts. But unlike the worst Philip K. Dick adaptations – Paycheck, Next, The Adjustment Bureau – Total Recall doesn’t indulge in spectacular action at the expense of the source material’s themes.
With a lead character who thinks he might be dreaming, Total Recall takes the escapism of action cinema literally. As usual, Verhoeven’s portrayal of violence is excessive and cartoonish enough to give Quentin Tarantino a run for his money, but these over-the-top sequences complement the movie’s study of the fragility of reality. In his depiction of Quaid’s life in a futuristic authoritarian society, Verhoeven drops some of the sharp commentary on life under fascist rule that he would later explore in more depth in his big-budget cult classic Starship Troopers. As a child, Verhoeven lived through the horrors of World War II in The Hague, so it’s a field in which he has some expertise.
Par for the course in the modern Hollywood landscape, Total Recall was remade in 2012 with Colin Farrell playing the role of Doug Quaid, but that movie was entirely bereft of the original’s satirical spirit. Director Len Wiseman (and perhaps some meddling studio executives) made it as a generic sci-fi action movie ticking off everything on the blockbuster checklist. The remake didn’t even go to Mars, which is like remaking Star Wars without the Death Star or remaking The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly without a buried cache of Confederate gold. While the Total Recall remake has aged terribly less than a decade later, the original movie still holds up after its 30th anniversary.
With its warnings about the advancement of technology and its mind-boggling series of plot twists, Total Recall essentially plays like a big-budget Black Mirror episode set on Mars. But it’s still an Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie at the end of the day, so there are more fist fights than the average Black Mirror episode.