There's no denying that Philip K Dick has proved to be one of the most influential sci-fi writers of a generation. His works are both thought-provoking and mind-boggling as is only fitting for someone who regularly walked that fine line between genius and madness, as is evident from Exegisis. One of the problems with Dick's work, when it comes to making movies, is so much of it is internalised, which is hard to adapt to a visual medium, especially for Hollywood, which relies on eye candy. The other aspect of adapting Dick's work has been the fact that his most accessible work has been his short stories, so the screenwriters have had to pad out the stories from their less fertile imaginations, with some exceptions.

Blade Runner has earned its place as one of the iconic sci-fi movies, thanks to Ridley Scott's stunning vision, even if it did stray away from the original material (a 30th Anniversary Blu-ray box-set is out at the end of October). In terms of accurate adaptations, Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly is probably the most accurate of the commercial releases, although it is somewhat let down by the rotoscope stylings, and the low budget Radio Free Albemuth, which showed at SFL11. However, for sheer, ballsy entertainment, Paul Verhoeven's adaptation of We Can Remember it for You Wholesale, Total Recall is by far the most watchable.

When it was announced that Total Recall would be remade, or reimagined, most of us thought it was a bad idea. Now, having seen it, I'm not sure where I stand. Inevitably, it continually drew comparisons with the original even though it is a completely different movie. For a start it's not set on Mars but Earth, where the only safe places to live are Britain and Australia, which are connect by a massive elevator through the centre of the planet, which gives the movie a whole different setting for the story, even if more implausible than it being set on Mars given America's current invasion (if the US go to Mars it's scientific exploration, but if Martians were to come here it would be seen as an invasion). The basic plot of the story remains the same (as it should), with the visit to Rekall, the pretend wife, being a secret agent etc but it relies to heavily on frenetic action do cover up a script that lacks any depth, and is something of an insult to Dick's legacy.

Rather than sit here and try and rationalise what, about the film, does and doesn't work, I am going to let our friend David Watson from FilmJuice (whose opinions are very much his own) vent his spleen on the matter.

*Definitely contains spoilers*
Watching Len Wiseman’s lacklustre remake/retread/reboot/regurgitation (delete as you feel applicable) of Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 sci-fi classic Total Recall don’t be alarmed if you’re continually distracted from the frenetic but uninvolving spectacle before you by several recurring questions: Why would someone bother remaking this film?  Why am I bothering to watch it?  Does the plot really revolve around a f*cking elevator?  Has Len Wiseman actually managed to tit up the three-titted hooker?  In case you’re wondering, the answers are: Greed and intellectual bankruptcy.  Who the Hell knows why you’re watching?  Yes, it’s about a f*cking elevator.  Yes, Wiseman somehow managed to tit up the three-titted hooker.

By the end of the 21st century, the Earth has been devastated by chemical warfare leaving the only habitable areas the evil, despotic United Federation of Britain (where everyone seems to be American) and The Colony (formerly Australia where everyone, again, seems to be American).  Just as today when a migrant workforce of Australians travel to Britain to monopolise our bar jobs, the future residents of The Colony must travel to Britain every day by means of a gravity elevator drilled through the Earth’s core (yup, the aforementioned f*cking elevator) to work in menial factory jobs building the robocops that enslave them on behalf of Britain’s villainous ruler Chancellor Cohaagen (Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston).

Unfulfilled by his work on the assembly line building robocops and bored of going home every night to schtup the director’s wife (Kate Beckinsale in the Sharon Stone role), Average Joe and Colony resident Doug Quaid (Colin Farrell) decides to take a vacation from himself and visits Rekall where he can have his wildest fantasies implanted in his head as realistic memories.  By John Cho.  Let’s just stop and think about that for a second.  Would you trust Harold from Harold And Kumar to screw around with your brain?

Doug does and after choosing to have a fantasy life as a secret agent implanted, wouldn’t you know it, he discovers he really is a secret agent whose mind has been wiped by the evil Cohaagen after falling in love with comely Resistance fighter Melina (Jessica Biel) while his wife is revealed to be a ball-busting bitch assassin out to kill him and his fractured mind may just hold the secret to freeing The Colony’s huddled masses from the tyrannical rule of the Brits.  But with Cohaagen gearing up to use his droid army to invade The Colony (using, you guessed it, that f*cking elevator), Quaid and Melina find themselves in a race against time to stop him.

There’s a moment in Total Recall that could almost serve as an indictment of the whole sorry excuse for a film.  Colin Farrell is fighting a robot.  In an elevator.  Yes, director Wiseman seems to have something of a fetish for elevators.  Beside him, Jessica Biel and Kate Beckinsale are engaged in 12a-rated hand-to-hand combat.  While they may be lovely to look at, be honest, neither Biel nor Beckinsale has ever given a performance that’s been liable to trouble Oscar voters. Watching them fight is possibly less involving than watching a couple of Transformers go at it.  They could be naked and wrestling in a hot tub full of baked beans and it probably still wouldn’t raise your pulse.  But look closely.  If you stare really intently, if you squint, as he’s punching the robot, you can actually see the light die in Colin Farrell’s eyes.  “Did I really get clean and sober for this sh*te?” he seems to be thinking, “Thank feck I’ve got Martin McDonagh’s new film on the horizon.” 

The problem with Total Recall isn’t that it’s bad.  Or that it’s dumb.  It’s that it’s so bad and so dumb.  Leave aside the frankly insulting concept of it being about a lift that travels through the Earth’s core.  THE EARTH’S F*CKING CORE!  Where temperatures are in excess of 5000°C!  Leave aside the fact that every day the inhabitants of Australia (who all sound American.  Even the Irish ones) are so poor they have to travel by this elevator to work in Britain’s factories building robots.  Leave aside the fact that we’ve invented autonomous robot policeman but haven’t bothered teaching them to build more robots thus eliminating the need both for the elevator and the indentured Australian workforce (who still all sound American.  Just saying). Leave aside the fact that the destruction of the elevator would mean not freedom but the crash of The Colony’s economy and society.  Forget all of that. The dumbest thing about Total Recall is casting Colin Farrell, COLIN FARRELL, one of Tinseltown’s most charismatic and notorious pussy hounds, as a man who, when propositioned by a hooker with three, count ‘em, THREE tits looks confused and asks for directions to the place that sells fake memories. There’s not a snowball’s chance in Hell of that happening. The Colin Farrell we know and love would saddle up and create some brand spanking new memories. Quite possibly involving spanking. And right there’s the problem with Total Recall. It’s timid. It’s bland. It’s safe. Which is one thing Verhoeven’s original was not.

Verhoeven’s Total Recall was a smart, political, bitingly funny satire masquerading as a rabidly bonkers, full-blooded, testosterone-fuelled slice of mayhem in which the Governator’s kill-crazy rampage across two planets and his freeing of the beleaguered Martian proletariat from Earth’s despotic Nazi rule may all, slyly, have been part of the main character’s blissful psychotic fantasy.  By contrast, Wiseman’s remake is a boring, po-faced, anemic, CGI-heavy cheat sheet stealing all of its best moments from other, better movies.  You like the Mag-Lev car chase sequence from Minority Report?  How about that mind-boggling shifting gravity fight scene from Inception?  Maybe the free-running chases of the Bourne movies?  Well, Total Recall has them all, they’re just a teeny bit crapper. It lacks the ambiguity of the original, the gleefully gratuitous sex and violence, the cartoonish energy, the humour. It’s dull. It’s boring. And no film featuring a hooker with three tits should be boring.

It’s not the fault of the actors.  A sexy, charismatic performer, Farrell tries manfully but the script does him few favours.  He’d have made a meal of Arnie’s dialogue from the original movie, roguishly spitting out one-liners as he blows away baddies but, in a script shorn of humour, he never gets the chance to be anything other than earnest and confused.  Biel wanders through the film looking like an attractive but startled dolphin, light years removed from the feisty, ass-kicking heroine Rachel Ticotin was but she’s not called upon to be anything more than the wet love interest while Beckinsale seems once again to have been cast in a Wiseman film because she’s Wiseman’s wife.  Here she’s called upon to fill the shoes of both Sharon Stone and Michael Ironside as Quaid’s pursuer and manages to be neither as tough or sexy as either. Bill Nighy shuffles on for a little while as the leader of the Resistance and is Bill Nighy with a bad American accent. Bryan Cranston’s Cohaagen, while never as lip-smackingly evil as Ronny Cox, is a perfectly fine evil dictator even if he never actually represents much of a threat to our hero. Someone, somewhere should have started getting nervous when they realised the climax of the film would be a punch-up between a fit, young, hell-raising, Irish brawler and Malcolm In The Middle’s dad. 

It’d be easy to lay the blame for Total Recall at the feet of writers Mark Bomback and Kurt Wimmer but what did you expect from a collaboration between the men who separately brought us Race to Witch Mountain and Ultraviolet? Coherent, intelligent, boundary-pushing cinema? We could blame Wiseman but it’s rather sweet that he keeps casting the missus despite her thespian shortcomings. Ultimately, who really cares who’s to blame? It’s just a film. A bad film. One which, if Rekall actually existed, you’d have wiped from your memory and replaced with the memory of another, better film. Maybe the memory of this cool science fiction flick from the early '90s about a guy who discovers his memory’s been wiped…

Total Recall is in cinemas now.