Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Sci-Fi Cult Classic Repeated A Weird Blade Runner Trick
Do you remember the past? Are you sure?
The greatest Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi movie ever is, without a doubt, Terminator 2: Judgment Day. And yet, the classic sci-fi thriller that required Arnold to do the most amount of real acting in concert with being an action badass is the 1990 cult classic Total Recall. Not only does this movie hold up much better than it should, but it’s also notable in the history of science fiction insofar as it turned a fluke in 1982 into a bona fide rule: When you adapt some material from the brilliant writer Philip K. Dick, your best best is to make sure you change the story quite a bit.
Like Blade Runner before it, Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 film Total Recall was based on writing from sci-fi visionary, Philip K. Dick. But, paradoxically, just like Blade Runner, what makes Total Recall a success is the way it honors the original idea, but utterly transforms that concept into something completely new.
Based on Dick’s 1966 short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale,” Total Recall’s basic sci-fi premise deals with the concept of virtual memories. Instead of taking a vacation to Mars, a company called Rekall (“Rekal” in the short story) will give you the cheaper option of implanting memories in your mind that make you think you’ve been on Mars.
Like with all movies with set-ups that involve sci-fi vacations (see Westworld, Jurassic Park, et al), this procedure doesn’t exactly go to plan. Instead, the entire premise of the film version of Total Recall rests on the idea that Douglas Quaid (Schwarzenegger) is interested in paying for secret agent fantasies, which really represent his true identity.
In terms of the basic premise, Total Recall, the movie, and “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale,” the story, both deal with the same concept and the same question: Which memories are real? Which ones have been implanted? And where do those memory-tampering events overlap?
But, the biggest divergence is the most crucial one: Whereas Dick is content to keep Douglas Quail (not Quaid) on Earth, dealing with the puzzle of his true memories, the film literally sends the lead character to Mars. In fact the line “Get your ass to Mars” is one of the most iconic aspects of the films, which is ironic, because in Dick’s version nobody’s ass ever made it to Mars, at least not in the present tense of the story.
Arnold Schwarzenegger takes a leap.
In a sense, screenwriters Gary Goldman, Ronald Shusett, and Dan O'Bannon (of Alien fame) attacked Dick’s premise and made it much more literal. This approach mirrors the way Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner took the Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and extracted the interiority of that story into a pulse-pounding thriller. Total Recall is not the same story as Blade Runner at all, but if you squint, it is the 1990 version of Blade Runner, complete with a shortened title.
But, turning a Twilight Zone-esque Dick premise into a fantastic action movie only works if the cast is solid. And when it comes to Total Recall, the cast is almost too good to be believed. Famously, Verhoeven found Sharon Stone’s performance in Total Recall to be so riveting that it led to her taking the lead in the 1992 film Basic Instinct. In Total Recall, she plays Quaid’s faux-wife Lori, who is really a secret agent assigned to watch him and make sure his real memories don’t return. (Spoiler alert: Those memories do return.)
Quaid struggles to escape the torment of fake memories.
Having someone as good as Sharon Stone in a supporting role reveals one of the reasons why Total Recall is so great and watchable. Ronny Cox reteams with Verhoeven here, just a few years after playing a very similar villainous role in 1987’s RoboCop. Michael Ironside is reliably great, as is Arnold’s primary co-star, the deeply underrated Rachel Ticotin.
Throw in an unforgettable musical score from sci-fi legend Jerry Goldsmith (Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Alien) and you’ve got a movie that feels as good as it is. When it comes to sci-fi action movies, this may be the one thing fans and critics tend to forget. The wonderful, mind-bending ideas have to be there, and those ideas have to be interesting. But the movie itself almost has to be slightly disinterested in just how clever its plot is. Despite having a vaguely confusing premise that predicts some of the films of Christopher Nolan, Total Recall is never too smart for its own good. Its engine is a relentlessly paced mystery plot, with one man on the run.
And because that aspect of the movie is so well done, the sci-fi plot twists of Total Recall are almost a bonus. Thirty-five years later, the movie is so entertaining that revisiting the movie is essential right now, if only to prove to yourself that your memories of it weren’t tampered with while you were sleeping.
