Welcome to Memory Holed, a new column from MovieWeb deputy editor and film critic Britt Hayes (that’s me). Each week, I’ll revisit the movies (and occasionally TV shows) that were culturally relevant for a brief time before collapsing into obscurity. Whether they were notable for having high-profile casts, generating awards-season buzz, using popular IP, stirring controversy, igniting discourse, or any combination of the above, these movies have been deliberately erased from the pop-culture consciousness. In other words: they’ve been memory-holed.
Three years after the 1987 adaptation of The Running Man, Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in another, better adaptation: Total Recall. Paul Verhoeven expanded Philip K. Dick’s short story into a feature-length sci-fi action flick about a working-class guy trying to figure out if his dreams are actually memories of his life as a spy who defected and joined a rebellion against an authoritarian regime in a dystopian future. Verhoeven’s film explores themes of colonialism, corporate capitalism (a Verhoeven special), and identity, and features one of Schwarzenegger’s best performances.
Unfortunately, I’m not here to talk about that film. Instead, with Edgar Wright’s The Running Man hitting theaters this weekend, I stupidly thought now would be a great time to revisit another remake of a Schwarzenegger movie: 2012’s Total Recall, which unwisely cast Colin Farrell in the Schwarzenegger role. In the lead-up to writing this week’s column, I told several friends and co-workers – fellow movie nerds, all – that I was writing about the 2012 remake. They either hadn’t seen it or they didn’t know it existed, which is kind of amazing when you consider that it made over $211 million worldwide and features a cast that includes Bryan Cranston, Ethan Hawke (more on him in a minute), Kate Beckinsale, John Cho, Jessica Biel, and Bill Nighy. That was an impressive ensemble in the 2010s!
I also had not seen Total Recall, a decision that, in hindsight, was very smart and correct. Directed by Len Wiseman of Underworld franchise fame (hence the Beckinsale casting) and based on a script by Kurt Wimmer (Equilibrium) and Mark Bomback (Unstoppable), 2012’s Total Recall is profoundly uninteresting, both visually and textually. Shot like a car commercial, Wiseman’s film is derivative of other Philip K. Dick adaptations – namely, Blade Runner and Minority Report, the latter of which also starred Farrell and was originally developed as a Total Recall sequel.
Wiseman’s remake takes the plot of the 1990 film, which is already fairly – and deliberately – complex, and makes it unnecessarily convoluted. The movie starts with a title card explaining that chemical warfare has destroyed much of Earth, leaving only two regions: the United Federation of Britain (the UK and parts of Europe) and the Colony, which is just Australia. The world’s greatest resource is “living space.” All of this is extremely stupid – part of what makes Verhoeven’s movie work is that it’s split between a colonized Mars and a dystopian Earth. In the 2012 version, the wealthy elites live in the UFB, while the working-class majority have to commute via “The Fall,” a gravity elevator that runs through Earth’s core. If that sounds cool, that’s too bad, because this movie doesn’t spend much time on it until the end.
Quaid is a working-class guy who makes a living building militant robots for the authoritarian regime controlled by Cohaagen (Cranston). Lately, he’s been having dreams in which he’s a spy on the run with a beautiful woman (Biel), so he decides to visit Rekall, a company specializing in implanted memories. This gives us what is maybe the movie’s only compelling scene, when John Cho, as a Rekall tech, delivers a monologue about dreams, memories, and the perceived reality of experience. For a brief moment, I thought this movie might have some secret juice.
Of course, the procedure goes sideways because Quaid might actually be a spy whose hidden memories are being awakened. It’s not long before he discovers a secret message he recorded for himself, in which he reveals that the UFB captured Quaid and gave him new memories and a new life, married to a woman named Lori (Beckinsale), who turns out to be kind of an a-hole.
After getting rescued by Melina, the woman from his dreams, Quaid finds another video recording he left for himself that only further complicates the plot. Quaid is actually Hauser, a UFB spy who infiltrated the resistance and then defected when he fell in love and realized he was on the wrong team. Matthias (Nighy), the leader of the resistance, has a kill code that will wipe out Cohaagen’s robot army before he uses it to kill everyone in the Colony so the UFB can have more “living space.”
This scene is ridiculous for several reasons, not the least of which is that Hauser is played by Ethan Hawke, who delivers a massive exposition dump that wasn’t even included in the theatrical release. I cannot imagine watching Total Recall without this scene – there’s no way the rest of the movie makes a lick of sense, not that the script is dealing with much sense to begin with. Quaid is inexplicably able to communicate with the recording of himself/Hauser, who seemingly responds to Quaid’s questions. Furthermore, if the UFB wipes out the Colony, they won’t have any underpaid laborers left to exploit, so the UFB’s plan makes zero sense. (On the other hand, that is exactly the sort of short-sighted mentality we’re seeing play out in 2025 among a billionaire class that seems hellbent on driving the lower classes further into poverty while doomsaying about a population decline that could be rectified by providing people with healthcare, affordable housing, and access to resources. Not that Len Wiseman was thinking about this.)
Total Recall culminates in a series of action sequences that are unremarkable in every sense of the word, leading to a showdown in which it’s revealed that Biel’s character is actually the daughter of Matthias – not that it matters – and Cohaagen claims that he erased Quaid/Hauser’s memories on purpose so that he could more easily infiltrate the resistance.
It’s impossible to avoid comparisons with Verhoeven’s film, which Wiseman exacerbates with needless references to the original. The most glaring reference is a great example of everything that’s wrong with Wiseman’s version: the three-breasted woman, who appears in the 1990 version as a sex worker in a colony plagued by physical mutations due to radiation and pollution. Despite its two-hour runtime, the remake doesn’t have time to address climate change, but there’s no way Wiseman wasn’t putting a woman with three boobs in this movie. There’s a brief scene in which she panders to Quaid, and we’re left to ponder a dystopian future in which human and robot sex workers live and work side by side. Those social and political dynamics are potentially compelling, but again, Wiseman isn’t interested in pursuing them.
Nor is he interested in Verhoeven’s ambiguous ending, which encourages viewers to debate whether the entire film was a dream or reality, and what either outcome might mean for Quaid. Instead, Wiseman gives Beckinsale the sort of moment reserved for the climax of a slasher film, in which the killer, having been defeated, improbably returns to life for one last scare. While it’s hard to argue against the decision to give a woman more screentime in a movie with only one other prominent female character, Lori isn’t meant to endure the runtime, and Total Recall is burdened by too many characters and narrative threads as is.
I knew that Wiseman’s Total Recall wasn’t a secret masterpiece, but I’d hoped that it might be a hidden gem or, at the very least, a campy misfire. Instead, it commits the ultimate cinematic crime: it’s boring as hell.
- Release Date
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August 2, 2012
- Runtime
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118 Minutes