Category Archives: Life Unconstructed

Quick Review: Total Recall (2012)

21 Friday Dec 2012

Posted by in Movies

≈ Comments Off

Tags

First off: Did this movie need to be remade? No. I remember seeing the original Total Recall in the theaters and enjoying it immensely, save for the idiotic SFX when people were exposed to low pressure. It was the perfect vehicle for Schwarzenegger, and for the director Verhoven, who had given us the witty and ultraviolent Robocop.

That said, I wasn’t such an aficionado of the original I didn’t think it could be done better. So did Len Wiseman pull that off? There’s a lot of critics and fan reviews that say no. My response is no, if you were looking to get your ass to Mars; yes, if you were looking for something riffing on the movie and its very short story source material.

The good: It looks great and is very atmospheric. I was going to say if was very Blade Runner in look, but I’d suggest it owes more to Ghost in the Shell and other good anime universes than that august film. The performances: Farrell is good in most of his roles (truly great in Tigerland, Phone Booth, and Ondine) and he is much more believable as the everyman who finds out he’s a superspy. Kate Beckinsale is fantastic as the femme fatale and seems to be really enjoying herself through the movie. Jessica Biel is Jessica Biel. Bryan Cranston is solid as the bad guy. Some of the tech has the same “I want that!” impact that Minority Report had.

The adequate: the set up for the film — that most of the world has been ravaged by a chemical war that’s left just bits of Europe (the United Federation of Britain) and Australia (the Colony) habitable. The colony provides labor for the people topside and with living space at a premium, Chancellor Cohagen (Cranston) is looking to engineer a fight with the Colony, in which he will use robotic police/soldiers against the unarmed population. There’s a resistance, of course, that is of middling use.

The bad: The main conceit is that the workers get from the Colony to the topside using “the Fall” — a massive, skyscraper sized elevator through the planet. It’s a staple of golden age science fiction, and if you are willing to just roll with it, you’ll probably like the movie. If you can’t get past it…well, have a look at Looper. For my part, the rest of the movie was pretty enough and fun enough to look past it. The other bad: the Resistance. They’re awful, ineffective, and when we do find them toward the end of the movie, they have basically been holding out for an ephemeral “kill switch” for the robotic forces that the hero supposedly has recovered. Bill Knighty doesn’t even get enough screen time to have an impact on the movie…and that’s a shame.

Is it as bad as it was made out to be by the old fans of the original movie? No. Is it a terrible movie? No. A lot of the critics seemed to like doing the “it’s a Bourne movie in the future” complaint — a quick quip from the bard, “There is nothing new under the sun…” But I think he was paraphrasing. The amnesiac running from shadowy forces while trying to save the girl/nation/world is a pretty old theme.

Style: 4 out of 5 — a lot of the look is derivative of Blade Runner and various anime. I rather liked it. Substance 3 out of 5: It’s the usual amnesiac running from shadowy forces while trying the save the girl/nation/world movie. Just because you’ve seen it before doesn’t mean you might not like it.

A definite rent.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 186 other followers