From the Vault: Total Recall

There are certain movies that, good or bad, make their foothold in our cinematic consciousness. On the other hand certain movies, good or bad, can slip to the back of our consciousness. Each month I'll be taking a look back at a movie that since it was released has fallen through the cracks, been completely forgotten about, or just hasn't been watched in a while. This month:

Total Recall

Science fiction is a genre that cannot avoid becoming dated sometimes after a decade or two or sometimes after just a couple years. Total Recall was made 20 years ago and it holds up very well. The special effects do not look dated and the overall depiction of the future doesn't feel dated or cheesy. It's fun to go back and watch movies that are set in the future and see what predictions about the future have and haven't come true and which are laughable. Twenty years later several science fiction elements from Total Recall have actually come true, or sort of come true, including: GPS, video phones, and video monitors on heavy machinery.

Early on in the movie Quaid (Schwarzenegger) and his wife Lori (Sharon Stone) sit down to have breakfast and turn on the flat screen TV in their wall to watch the morning news. We have flat screen HD TV's that can be mounted on walls and I don't think it's too much of a stretch to imagine them being built into walls.

Quaid keeps having dreams about being on Mars, dreams he thinks might be memories, so he goes to a company called Rekall that can implant in your mind the manufactured memory of a vacation so you don't have to go through the trouble of an actual vacation. He hopes that having a memory of a vacation to Mars will quell his dreams. Now, of course this doesn't exist, yet. But there is a company called Zero G that will fly you in a jet that flys in parabolic arcs so you can experience true weightlessness. Tickets have already been sold for the first commercial flight into space, though the shuttle for that hasn't even been yet. So vacations in space have sort of come true.

When Quaid walks into a train station he passes through an X-Ray security check point and gets onto a train with TV's playing ads. Later on in the movie when he's being chased he passes through the system and the gun he's carrying sets off alarm. Now I know there's not X-Ray security checkpoints at train stations or even at airports but a type of X-Ray security scanner does exist though it's not in use because instead of showing a skeleton, it only peels back a couple layers of clothing and the image seen is more along the lines of a nude person, and not everyone is okay with that.

There's a scene where Sharon Stone is practicing her tennis stroke by mimicking an instructional hologram. When she gets it's right the hologram lights up. There's no holograms involved with Nintendo Wii, yet, but the similarities are striking.

I haven't even talked about about the movie itself. It's a good, solid, and entertaining movie and it holds up very well. The sci-fi elements that have actually come true now only make this movie more impressive. It's a good action movie but it also deals with perceptions of reality and dreams and memories. If you haven't seen this movie in a while I highly recommend watching it again and if you're in the mood to be overwhelmed with accents then check out the DVD commentary with Paul Verhoeven and Arnold Schwarzenegger. As for the Total Recall remake, let's not and say we did.