If you want to understand how Hollywood producers (and writers) can totally miss the point of the work that they are adapting into a film, then Total Recall is a good case history. Taking Philip K. Dick’s story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale and turning it into a brash action movie (dispensing with the services of David Cronenberg along the way when he tried to rewrite the film back into something resembling the source material) and replacing Dick’s ordinary hero with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is never going to pass as ‘everyman’, this is a film that you look at and wonder why the hell the even wasted their time on a source story in the first place.

Not that this makes Total Recall a bad film. Taken on its own, this is in many ways an exemplary science fiction action film, rarely pausing for breath and carefully burying its more intellectual and thoughtful elements beneath a barrage of explosions, gun fire and gore – and so managing to appeal across the board.

Schwarzenegger is Douglas Quaid, a construction worker on a future Earth who’s ordinary life is marred only by a recurring dream of a mysterious woman on Mars, which has been colonised and is now facing insurrection from rebel mutants and others seeking independence. Quaid visits Rekall, a company that specialise in implanting false memories or virtual vacations, aiming to play out a fantasy of being a secret agent on Mars, but the machine instead unleashes a previously wiped memory that suggests Quaid really WAS a sinister government agent. His cover now blown, Quaid finds himself under continual attack – from co-workers, his wife (a remarkably sexy and kick-ass Sharon Stone) and others – and he flees to Mars in search on answers.

Directed with his usual mix of violent action and humour (though with little sex, for once) by Paul Verhoeven, Total Recall is certainly relentless once it gets going, and so it’s admirable that as much plot is crowbarred in as there is. That said, a lot of characters are pretty underdeveloped, and as for Schwarzenegger – we’ll, you’re either a fan, or you’re not. And I’m not. There is, however, some amusement seeing the notoriously right-wing performer in what is, at heart, an attack on totalitarianism.

What’s most interesting about the film is the ambiguity of the plot, which could well be a dream – or more accurately, the very secret agent fantasy that Quaid had requested. Certainly, the story follows the exact plot that was laid out to Quaid as his Rekall ‘memory’, and the playing between truth and fiction is laced subtly throughout the film.

Twenty-two years on, Total Recall still generally stands up, a few dodgy blue-screen moments aside (and these arguably add to the air of unreality). It’s less subversive and less interesting than either Robocop or Starship Troopers, and you’re still left wondering what a more honest version of Dick’s story would be like (something that the new remake is unlikely to tell us), but it’s head and shoulders above most Schwarzenegger films and solid entertainment. This new edition features the previous extant commentary track from Verhoeven and Schwarzenegger, a special effects featurette and an excitable new interview with Verhoeven. The Blu-ray – which I haven’t seen but which is the edition you’ll all be buying – contains considerably more.

DAVID FLINT

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