Paul Verhoeven proved his sci-fi chops with the 1987 cyberpunk masterpiece RoboCop, but that film’s grimy location shoots and dilapidated effects scarcely offered evidence that he could mount a film on the level of Total Recall. Based on Philip K. Dick’s story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” the film ventures to Mars to find mutants, alien relics, and massive conspiracies. There are laser fights, drill traps, holograms, and Michael Ironside as a belligerent henchman.
Or maybe there aren’t. Verhoeven wasn’t the first to make a fugue state film, one in which everything on screen could conceivably be reality or a hallucination, but Total Recall marked a radical break from the increasingly simplified blockbusters that dominated the 1980s. Its narrative corkscrews and doubles back, casting doubt upon itself at every turn as certain elements align too eerily with the false memories that construction worker Douglas Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger) intends to buy from a company dealing in mind trips. Even if one sets aside the constant question of whether Quaid’s adventure is the result of his true self being unlocked under this purchasable brainwash or the actual content of his vision package, the film still offers a story about a man fighting a collusion between reactionary government officials and corporate interests in a reversal of conservative blockbuster trends.
Total Recall is at once opulent and severe. William Sandell’s production design extrapolated from Mexico City’s New Brutalist aesthetic, one in which giant block structures loom over the action, drearily perfect geometric slabs of concrete that recapitulate the functional, anti-bourgeois minimalism of Communist-era public housing with the equally dehumanizing vision of a future run purely on capital. On Mars, the oppressiveness of the soulless buildings overwhelms, primarily because no one can escape outside them thanks to the planet’s suffocating atmosphere. In many respects the film is a western with a sealed-off frontier, a range that represents tranquility and hope compared to the corrupt town the characters cannot flee. The decay that such an environment creates manifests literally in the side effects of all the resource drilling that occurs in the buildings, dredging up toxic elements that cause mutations and defects in the poor forced to work around them. (Among other things, Total Recall is a topical allegory about fracking perils more than a decade before that cause went mainstream.)
Yet if the sets and matte paintings are severe, Verhoeven’s natural inclination to mania generates a frenzy within the blank walls that represents a rebellion against this rigid way of life. Many of the film’s most memorable moments are also its funniest, like the gross-out effect of Quaid yanking a preposterously large tracking device out through his nose, or when he tries and fails to sneak through Mars customs inside an animatronic woman suit. The latter in particular is pure comedy, the future-tech version of Bugs Bunny duping Elmer Fudd with a bit of lipstick and a wig. The action scenes regularly veer into silliness themselves: check the early, vicious fight between Quaid and Lori (Sharon Stone playing Quaid’s sleeper agent wife) in which Lori goes at it with far greater gusto than the blockbuster legend himself. The final firefight also has its gleeful fake-outs, and much of the film’s energy can be summarized by a holographic Quaid laughing uproariously for making the bad guys waste all their shots.
Casting Schwarzenegger as a maybe-ordinary construction worker Douglas Quaid, maybe-interplanetary corporatist mole Carl Hauser might seem to call for acting chops beyond his powers. Admittedly, he scarcely deviates from his usual style, making sardonic wisecracks while otherwise reading lines in his alternately flat and amped Austrian cadence. But the actor was always shrewder than his simple persona suggested, and his blunt performance deepens–instead of counteracts–the cerebral nature of the story and its structure. His impassive, slightly put-out trademark allows him to situate himself perfectly at the fulcrum of the Quaid/Hauser split, lending no credence to either personality. A “better” actor might drop clues as to the character’s true identity, or at least the identity he believed to be true, but Schwarzenegger is Schwarzenegger, and good luck seeing through that stone face. (Having said that, a scene in which “Hauser” addresses “Quaid” via video message instantly delineates the two personalities, the former speaking in a vivacious, relaxed manner completely distinct from Quaid.) The Kuleshovian properties of Schwarzenegger’s face would prove to be influential in their own right when it came to movies like this, prefiguring Keanu Reeves’ existence between real and programmed worlds in The Matrix and Guy Pearce’s deliberately drained performance in Memento’s games of metaphysical unreliability.
As with RoboCop, Total Recall remains such an enduringly relevant, surprising, invigorating film that its subsequent remake could not help but seem more amateurish and instantly dated in comparison. Its influence can be mostly measured only in small glimpses of ambition; many blockbusters have since adopted a self-serious, operatic tone, but few can manage the tossed-off, wry brilliance that Verhoeven packs into every amusing frame. Like so many goofy relics of a time before science fiction and action began to insist upon their intelligence, Total Recall now looks altogether smarter, more mature, and more visionary than the self-conscious white elephants that followed it.