Total Recall 2012 Directed by Len Wiseman

Total Recall 2012

Directed by Len Wiseman

Compared to Bladerunner or the first Total Recall, this movie had a very smooth production cycle. This version of the film was written by Kurt Wimmer and Mark Bomback. Kurt Wimmer is known for having written and directed the cult classic Equilibrium (the movie that introduced me to the thirst-vehicle known as Christian Bale.) and the not so classic Ultraviolet (Oh Boy…). Mark Bomback has a list of work he's done both overtly and under the table, including some work on Logan but also Fifty Shades of Grey and the 2017 Mummy (THOSE LAST TWO DON'T BODE WELL! Prepare your bodies, comrades!). Lens Wiseman, a California native mostly known for his work on the Underworld (Mixed bag, at best) series (seriously every film as credited him as a writer, producer, director or two out of those three) as well as Live Free or Die Hard was brought in to direct. He, of course, brought in his then-wife Kate Beckinsale to play the main villain of the story. Which means he's responsible for the best thing in this film but I'll get to that. Jessica Biel and Colin Farrell were brought in to play the protagonists and Bryan Cranston was brought in to be utterly wasted I mean play Kate Beckinsale's boss and supposedly ultimate antagonist. The film performed poorly in the US but strongly overseas and thus made a profit, if not an overwhelming one. So let's take a look at the movie.

The film opens with exposition in the form of captions on the screen, which is rarely a good move sign and isn't here. We learn that most of the planet is uninhabitable due to chemical warfare tainting the land and killing off life (What? What the shit!? No! What the hell did we use? We could hose the earth down with Sarin and not kill all life!{What makes it worse is they specifically say chemical, not biological or nuclear}). However humanity and other forms of life hang on in two places, Northwestern Europe ruled by the United Federation of Britain (Oh fuck no! No no no! Why the shit does Britain get a pass? They’ve pissed off almost as many people as the US and you’re telling me that they didn’t get the toxic hose?!{head canon, Brexit really went weird and this is all their fault}) and Australia, now known as the Colony (Did… did Australia become a Crown Dominion again, or something?). They are connected by a single tunnel through the fucking center of the Earth (What!? No! That shit doesn’t work that way! Bad writers! <Uses the squirt gun>. What the shit are they using to hedge out the horrifying heat and pressure? How the hell did they dig through molten rock, to say nothing of the solid ball of metal we have for an inner core? It’s rotating! Not just rotating but the inner and outer core counter-rotate! So far this breaks SOD worse than The Core, and I know from first-hand experience that The Core causes geologists to wail and gnash their teeth like the damned at the tail end of Revelation!) which they use as a damn subway for worker commutes! I'm serious, our protagonists Douglas Quaid who is working, a dead-end job in a factory building androids by hand on an assembly line (You have androids! Why aren’t the robots building the robots?!  Human beings are forced to literally waste their one life on this Earth doing menial shit that could be done by non-sapient robots so that they can earn a paycheck and thus buy the damned robots! {Oh it gets worse, they waste robots here as only armed enforcers in addition to human troops or as sex workers} I’m okay. I promise, your - presumably - beloved editor did not just have a fucking stroke.), rides this thing pretty much every day back and forth from Australia to Europe (Ignore the twitching. I’ll just be over here, injecting myself through the neck with benzos.). The opening tells me that living space is the most valuable thing in the world because there's so little of it and already the premise of the movie is falling apart! But I'll get there. Doug Quaid, our protagonist is a factory worker with the world's most amazing(ly implausible) commute and is married to Lori, a rescue worker. She gets called away at odd hours because a Colony rebel movement keeps bombing subways in the UFB and she has to go and clean up the scenes. While his life isn't the greatest, it's not the worst, but he is plagued by a recurring dream where he is escaping from somewhere with a hot girl but gets captured, to the point that his wife is lovingly concerned and his friend Harry who works in the factory is also concerned. Trying to shake this off so he can focus on getting ahead at work and making his wife happy, he goes to ReKall, a shady company operating in the red light district (because we gotta get that three-breasted prostitute in there somewhere) to live a quick fantasy. However, it all goes sideways when a SWAT team kicks in the door before the memory implantation even starts and Doug ends up killing everyone and fleeing the scene. From there Doug finds out that Lori has only been “married” to him for 6 weeks and is an intelligence officer who proceeds to try and hunt him down with a relentless obsession. Doug has to assemble the pieces of his former life as Carl Hauser and figure out what the hell is going on and what he is going to do before he gets killed or worse, has Carl Hauser reimplanted into his head and his own life wiped out.

Let me start with what I liked. The visuals were amazing and the visual effects studio was hopefully paid and paid what they were worth (Even if the first condition is true - which in Hollywood it sometimes isn’t - capitalism is exploitation. So they were not paid what they were worth.). The film does a good job of producing interesting visuals and environments from hanging apartments in the Colony to the massive magnetic sky-ways in the UFB. The set work is pretty well done as well giving us an impression of many cultures jammed together in the Colony while the UFB is cleaner, more upper class and a monoculture. Kate Beckinsale does a great job as Lori, which in this film merges Michael Ironsides and Sharon Stone's character into a single one. The rest of the cast's acting ranged from inoffensive to decent and I didn't get the feeling that anyone was phoning it in. Although keep in mind I review books mainly not movies, so this isn't my strong suit. Additionally, there's a chase scene using cars that operate through magnetically gripping large sky-ways to move at incredible speeds. That was interesting and the action scenes use vertical space in new and inventive ways that I enjoyed. Now let's talk about the rest of it.

The writing is nonsense (Well...yes.). First of all, if you can drill a bloody tunnel from fucking England to damn Australia, you don't have a living space problem. Because drilling down a couple of miles will allow you to house millions if not billions (Vertical cities. Underground. You get to the right depth and you don’t even need to worry about air conditioning or heating, it stays a constant temperature. All you have to do is ventilate. And clearly, they won’t have structural integrity problems because they can keep the god damned mantel out!). Additionally, if you can build a ship that can survive going through the center of the fucking Earth several times a day with no noticeable damage or maintenance then you can damn well build the kind of shelters needed to house millions out in the corrupted and polluted Earth! (You have everything you need to build self-contained arcologies, including the institutional knowledge for building megastructures.) In three minutes the movie has rendered its own self-proclaimed problem moot by the technology that the exposition introduces! That has to be a record of some kind! Second of all the world-building is frankly piss poor even by Hollywood's standards, I mean why is Quaid's job necessary? They have a robot police force backing up human cops, they even have robot hookers trotting around the red light district, if you have so many damn robots why is Quaid on an assembly line putting robots together by hand? Wouldn't that be a job better done by... I don't know, fucking robots!?! (The answer is capitalism {I’m going to point out that in the real world capitalist societies are the one using robots to replace workers thus increasing the problems facing the working class} Yes, that is what I was getting at.{Are you arguing that a communist UFB wouldn’t have robots?}) Robots don't complain about double shifts or try to get promoted to supervisor after all. As another example, there's a scene where we get a look at a large stack of bills and find then-President Obama's face all over them. WHY? Neither state has its roots in the US and generally speaking you don't put foreign leaders from before your country existed on your money. It would be like if the US put Charlemagne on their money! Stick Winston Churchill, John Major, Sir Howard Florey anyone who’s British or Australian on the money instead. I know this seems like a minor detail but details like this pull me out of the story and instead of being drawn in and suspending my disbelief, I'm left feeling that there is nothing behind those details but pandering which kills the verisimilitude of the setting! When you do that, your audience is reminded that this is just a movie and that lessens their investment in it. Speaking of lessening my investment into the movie there's also the - even more - half-hearted attempt to interject the “is this real” question into the story by having Harry show up at armed standoff and tell his buddy Quaid to kill Biel's character and that will allow him back into reality... Somehow. If you want this to work guys, you need to commit to it, maybe have your stormtroopers wait until after Quaid's been injected or have him go under, have the scene fade to black and he wakes up to the troops storming the building. Something like that to create uncertainty! This should be writer 101 crap right here. I'd expect better from high school students (I have seen better from high school students.). Hell over on Archive of Our Own, I see better from high school students and I weep that those kids will never be published but people who write like this get small hills of money shoveled at them for this.

While the action uses space very cleverly and can be very kinetic at times, it's too clean and without consequences and that bothers me. In the 1990 Total Recall, people who were bystanders got hurt, injured and killed as a result of the actions of the characters (There were piles of bodies when automatic weapons came out. Innocent people were cast into near-vacuum to die horribly.). The action had consequences lending it extra weight to the viewer. While Verhoeven may be accused of going overboard with his blood and gore, the fact remains that when someone gets shot, it makes a fucking mess. Trust me on this one. The action in this film is very sterile, ensuring that our villainous minions are worse shots than even the Stormtroopers of legend. Because when they have a firefight in a crowded terminal, they don't hit our hero or anything else! Their bullets magically disappear into the realm of don't worry about it. This is something I've noticed in modern movies, a desire for massive action without any consequences and I don't care for it (Neither do I, for that matter.). I know some of you are saying I'm making too much of this but bluntly you people have your assumptions of how firefights and other such things are informed by popular media a lot more than you think. As someone who has had to have the same discussion on how a firefight works over and over and fucking over again with people who think firefights are clean, antiseptic affairs and bullets read your mind on where you want them to go if your heart is pure enough... THIS. SHIT. FUCKING. BOTHERS. ME. Sorry, that got away from me (He’s a combat veteran folks, you can imagine a lot of things in action movies bother him. Like bullets hitting a thin aluminum railing and sparking off, etc). I'm not demanding blood-soaked gore-fests with mountains of dead innocents, I don't think that's a good thing either; but if we're going to have action like this, I would like it shown with human costs and consequences. I think that would make for better films, better stories, and a better audience in the end. Which is what we all want right? Let's move on.

The characters are also rather flat, Melinda gets less development then she did even in the 1990 version and Lori is reduced to hating Quaid because she hates Quaid. I mean, give me something here, did he leave the seat up all the time, chew with his mouth open? Why is Lori so damn determined to bury him when her boss is telling her not to? (Well, imagine having to live with, sleep with, fuck, and pretend to love someone at work whom you hate, for six weeks. You might be really keen to kill them after six weeks.{Sure but why does she hate him? He seemed to be a pretty decent husband. With Michael Ironsides' character, you got it right away. He was pissed that Quaid had spent 6 weeks banging his girl and wanted payback. Here she hates because of some vague thing about traitors with no context.}) Speaking of that boss, Bryan Cranston was utterly wasted here with his role being a glorified cameo. You had He Who Knocks and you didn't do shit with him! I mean Total Recall 1990 went out of the way to let us get to know their arch-villain but Cranston's character is a Saturday morning cartoon character in comparison. A bland one. Considering that Ronny Cox's character was getting rich selling oxygen to a vital workforce, that's saying something! The villainous plot was also nonsensical. Cranston being the ruler of the UFB fakes a series of terrorist attacks so he could justify sending troops to the Colony to ethnically cleanse it and use its lebensraum living space for the citizens of the UFB. Which leads to several questions here. Like when the Colony already has members of the UFB armed forces handling all law enforcement and security, why do you have to justify shit? (Oh, that’s just part of the Ten Stages of Genocide. {Except all he has to do is simply keep moving troops into place until he has enough there and then just do it! It’s not like the damn robots will question orders! There is literally no point to the song and dance!} Getting it physically done is only half the battle. He still has to vilify and dehumanize them to avoid negative repercussions back home.{You mean back home where he has a complete monopoly of force and total control over the information flow? Again the plot is overly complex and unnecessary!}) What does the rebel movement do then, besides spray paint and hang out in the corrupted zones in airtight shelters with automatic rifles? I mean the rebels in Total Recall 1990 did questionable things (Debateable{They set off bombs in public places, on-screen. That’s questionable at best.}) but at least they fucking did shit! Lastly, the invasion force was 50,000 androids, who can be overpowered by humans in hand to hand combat, armed with rifles and pistols. There are millions of people in the colony. How is that supposed to work? There's no discussion of follow up waves or anything, it's “just unleash the robots to slaughter the underclass so I may gloat!”. This is surely easier and less troublesome than using 50,000 robots to dig tunnels or build sealed archaeologies for them to live in! Mine is an evil laugh and I like hearing it! Which is the only reason for this plan!

As you likely guessed readers, I'm not fond of this remake. The plot falls apart if you breathe on it too hard. You constantly question what anyone is doing and what the motivations are for their actions if you can summon up the energy for it. The action, while well done, is of the empty calorie variety and there to distract the audience from the plot instead of pulling them in. Lastly, I gave up Mars for this? I could have watched John Carter instead and at least had a good time. As a stand-alone film, I give this a D. Don't bother watching it. As an adaptation, you could change a few names and lines and no one would notice that it was an adaptation. So as an adaptation it gets a D- and frankly, someone should tell Hollywood not to bother with remakes if this is the crap they're going to churn out. Man, I hope the tv series is better than this.

Alright, it feels good to get that off my chest.  Now Total Recall was chosen by our always wise and gracious patrons, if you would like a voice in what reviews we do in the future or discuss possible theme months and more, join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where you can get a vote for just a dollar a month. Next week is Total Recall Machine Dreams 2070.  Until then, Keep Reading!

And don't watch Total Recall 2012!

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen
Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders