This 34-Year-Old Sci-Fi Gem Is the Perfect Choice if You Miss Christopher Nolan's Memento
Sometimes it's good not to understand what's happening on the screen.
Thanks to Robocop, director Paul Verhoeven was noticed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who offered him to direct Total Recall, an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's surreal short story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, which the Austrian director had been dreaming about for many years.
Paul agreed without even asking for his fee. In his hands, the movie became a bloody attraction with a hundred outstanding practical effects.
What is Total Recall About?
Arnold plays a simple worker, Doug Quaid, who decides to change his boring life with the help of a special service – impulses are sent to his brain, forcing him to live the life of another person.
Now he is a Special Forces soldier being hunted. Or was he always one? And the evil corporation tried to convince him that he is a simple worker? Soon Doug is completely confused in reality and in search of the truth even goes to Mars.
Total Recall Has a Lot in Common With Memento
On the one hand Schwarzenegger plays a typical action hero, but on the other hand he deconstructs this image a bit: if he used to play guys who knew exactly what they were doing, here Arnold is great in the role of a man who has no idea what is going on at all.
And in this, Total Recall is similar to Memento and its Leonard, played by Guy Pearce. Like Christopher Nolan's movie, Verhoeven's film deceives not only the characters themselves, but also the audience – you will not understand until the very end where the story is leading you.
Total Recall Has One of the Most Impressive Practical Effects
At the time of its making, Total Recall was one of the most expensive films in Hollywood history – its budget was $65 million. At the time, computer graphics were already being used, and the film even used motion-capture technology for the first time – in the scene where Quaid goes through an X-ray machine in the subway.
However, most of the visual effects were created using traditional methods – miniatures, models, makeup and animatronics. A good example is the classic scene where the main character removes his broken head mask. It is a real mechanism, in which there was a copy of Schwarzenegger's face.
For all this we should thank the team led by the famous Rob Bottin. It was he who created the special effects in The Thing, which are still considered the standard of the pre-computer era.
Paradoxically, The Thing did not bring Bottin any awards at the time – only hospitalization for nervous exhaustion. It was only eight years later that justice was served: Bottin won an Academy Award for his work on Total Recall.