Total Recall
There is something extremely recognizable about a Paul Verhoeven genre movie. Starship Troopers has it, RoboCop has it, and Total Recall has it too. While this style may not be for everyone, Total Recall is among the best at pulling it off, as its imaginative and mind-bending story is a good match for Verhoeven’s heightened-realism.
Verhoeven, regardless of whether he is dealing with a future setting or with contemporary times, attempts to have his movies walk right up to the edge of being ludicrous while staying safely on the other side. This is what I mean by heightened-realism. His aesthetics, in set design, costuming, and even cinematography, put style ahead of realism constantly, which in Total Recall results in a look that is brash, even garish at times. However, when the gimmick works it gives the movie a palpable sense of energy. Similarly, he pushes his actors to give performances that feel over the top but fall just shy of being overacted. He pushes the violence in his movies this same way, as well. Gratuitous kicks to the groin and almost cartoonish severing of arms walk that thin line between adding visceral thrills and feeling like low effort pandering. This is not an easy tone to pull off, which is probably why when it fails it does so catastrophically, as it did in Showgirls and, in my opinion at least, Starship Troopers. In Total Recall, it hits more than it misses. The movie is full of out-there ideas and set pieces that are anything but nuanced, but the rollercoaster nature of the film’s plot makes those things just feel like part of the ride. The only place Verhoeven’s style was notably off was in the set design.
The look of the movie is undeniably Verhoeven and reminded me immediately of Starship Troopers. For the longest time, however, I couldn’t put my finger on what exactly was so distinctly similar between the two films. Eventually, it hit me: everything looks like it was shot on a soundstage. The worlds these films inhabit don’t feel like genuine locations, they feel like futuristic sets constructed for a movie. The military bases in Starship Troopers and the Martian colonies in Total Recall have a fakeness to them that is hard to ignore. They reminded me of a planet-of-the-week from Star Trek: The Next Generation. This look is fine for vintage TV, where we are trained to be forgiving of the medium’s short production cycles and relatively smaller budgets, but it doesn’t work for a movie. It lacks that certain cinematic quality. By contrast, a movie like Star Wars, despite being made more than a decade before Total Recall, has aged far more gracefully because it went the extra mile to make its locations feel real.
What saves the movie, and perhaps makes its Verhoeven-ness more forgivable, is the nature of the story itself. Total Recall is based on a novel by Philip K Dick, who’s work also inspired Blade Runner, Minority Report, and many others. Set in the near future, Total Recall follows a simple construction worker, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who discovers he is actually a secret agent whose memories have been manipulated, with a past that draws him inexorably to the colonies of Mars to uncover who he truly is. Or does it? What we are seeing unfold may, itself, be a memory manipulation. The central theme of the movie is the age-old question of Plato’s allegory of the cave: is it possible to know if what you are experiencing is “real” or merely a “shadow” of reality. This makes much of the movie’s wilder elements more forgivable, since the heightened nature of everything could just be a product of the “false” experiences Schwarzenegger’s character is going through, making the film’s point of view an unreliable narrator. On the other hand, these experiences might not be false, in which case the heightened nature does well to convey to the audience the state of shock Schwarzenegger is feeling at discovering the identity he believed was real is not.
The story does more than justify Verhoeven’s penchant for turning his movie’s proverbial volume dial to 11. In fact, it is easily the strongest aspect of the movie. It does an amazingly good job of leaving whether anything we see in the movie, past the introduction and basic exposition, is actually happening. This ambiguity is unimpeachably tight. The first time you watch it you can only see it one way. Then you think about it, and you convince yourself it is the other way. Then upon more reflection, there appears incontrovertible evidence it is a dream. Then you think of how that’s not actually true, and it could still be real. And it is in this fruitless back and forth that I came to the realization that whether it is real or a fantasy, it is a damn well told story.
Total Recall has a lot of markers of a bad movie. For me, this is an unavoidable side effect of Verhoeven’s style. Some performances, especially those of the villains, border on melodrama. The visual design is all about saturated primary colors, with production design more reminiscent of vintage TV shows than a big budget movie. Still, the story’s handling of its core concept, the ambiguity of reality and dreams, is so well done and thoughtfully meshed with the exaggerated style that Total Recall is actually pretty good despite having elements one normally associates with a weaker film.
Would Recommend: If combining stylistically exaggerated acting, production design, and violence with heady, intellectually challenging storytelling sounds more like combining peanut butter with chocolate than peanut butter with boiled spinach.
Would Not Recommend: If stylistically exaggerated acting, production design, and violence sounds more like a high concept take on exploitation film garbage than something genuinely interesting.