Total Recall (2012)

TOTAL RECALL - Official Trailer - In Theaters August 3rd
Sony Pictures Entertainment

My wife went to bed early tonight so I'm looking for something to watch by myself and I'm not finding much. I can watch most anything with her, but not so by myself. I suppose it's kind of weird. I can't really explain it, but here we are. I try a few shows but nothing grabs me and then I remember Tom Cruise. I like his movies, lots of action, not a lot of chit chat, so I do a search on Netflix and it pulls up a couple of his lesser films and then it puts up a bunch of 'similar' ones, and what do we have here? A remake of Total Recall, which was one of the bestest films ever, so why have I never heard of the remake? This one stars Colin Farrell. Anyway, I watched it and it was great.

We have a world a hundred years in the future that has been devastated by chemical warfare. The only places left on the planet that are still habitable are western Europe and Australia. These two places are connected by a gravity train / elevator.  Gravity trains might be feasible as long as you don't go too deep, but this one goes through the center of the Earth because in the middle of the trip you are in free fall for a bit before gravity turns around starts pushing you to the ceiling. All fairly realistic except for the temperature. Don't know how you could possibly build a tunnel through the center of the earth where the temperature is a zillion degrees and the pressure is likewise enormous. But hey, it's science fiction, so maybe they've figured it out.

And we have technology, boy do we have technology. We have cars without wheels sliding around on and suspended underneath roads with no visible means of support, reminiscent of Minority Report. We have a dark, crowded city with a lot of Chinese styling clues, reminiscent of Blade Runner. We have armies of soldier robots being built in factories. Boston Dynamics anyone?

We have the hooker with three boobs. We have a complicated method delivering secret messages: we start with a piano with a dead key. Replace the dead key with one he found in a safe deposit box, play a certain tune on the piano and an interactive hologram pops up giving our hero vital information and answering a limited number of well phrased questions. (Can you rephrase that?) We have elevators that travel sideways as well as up and down like the ones on the Enterprise on Star Trek.

Then we have the passport scene, a clever homage to the original. Here is the original scene:

Total Recall's Two Weeks - Flickfeast's Scene Stealers
Flickfeast

And here is the remake. I see the lady in the yellow raincoat with the red hair and she looks just like Arnold's disguise in the original, although much smaller, and I'm wondering if this could be Colin's disguise. That would be cute even though she's really too short, but you know, movies sometimes do impossible stuff. Stuffing Colin into this body would just be one more unbelievable thing.


TOTAL RECALL - CLIP - TWO WEEKS - At Cinemas August 29
Sony Pictures Releasing UK
But no, she's a red herring, and Colin is the guy behind her. And of course both disguises fail during simple questioning by the passport control officer.