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Hey, Let’s Guess What the New Total Recall Will Be Like
A bunch of future-troopers taking a serious five on the set of Total Recall. Photo by jsaneb from the Torontoist Flickr pool.
So, because it’s the most expensive movie ever to be shot in our fair metropolis, and because it’s closing down streets all over town (and because people keep taking pictures of the production, and because, come on, it’s a Total Recall remake), we figured it’s about time we weighed in on the Total Recall remake. Why not? Sitting at home, shirtless on a rainy day, eating Kraft Dinner out of a pot, we might as well veer pimply foreheads–first into Ain’t it Cool News territory. So below—based on a few shots of someone riding around on the roof of a futuristic car—is our projection of what the Total Recall movie will be about.
When it was released in 1990, the original Total Recall, directed by Paul “The Director of Robocop” Verhoeven and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, was the most expensive motion picture ever produced. At the time, Hollywood had pretty much perfected itself. So being the most expensive movie ever produced didn’t really matter when you’d lose the title in two weeks to some other most expensive movie ever produced. But Total Recall occupies a special place, historically, as a massive-scale, massively budgeted, sci-fi actioner that relied by and large on practical effects. Set mostly on a futuristic Mars (or a construction worker’s schizoid projection of a futuristic Mars, more on that later), Total Recall relied heavily on miniatures, makeup, and the most impressive and practical effect of all, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s burly frame. Only a year later the Austrian Oak’s beefy musculature would be challenged, in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, by a computer-generated metallic assassin, kicking off the struggle between practical effects and digital effects that was over before it started.
Like the 1990 film, and every sci-fi movie of the past 30 years, this new Total Recall is loosely adapted from a story by Philip K. Dick, the author who minted more cerebral genre concepts than Clarke and Asimov combined. Dick’s novelette We Can Remember It For You Wholesale is about an average guy named Doug Quail (renamed Quaid in Verhoeven’s film, probably because of how preposterous it’d be to associate Arnold Schwarzenegger with some frilly game bird) who wants to take a vacation to Mars. Instead of going there, though, he goes to a place called Rekal Inc., which specializes in implanting false memories. So if you want to pretend like you lost your virginity to the prom queen when really you spent prom night at home watching Total Recall on TBS, you’d go to Rekal Inc. and they’d make it so. Quail/Quaid signs up for a special package, one that involves having the false memories of being a hot-shot secret agent implanted into his head. During the procedure, something goes wrong and it’s revealed that Quail/Quaid actually is a secret agent and that his memories of going to Mars have been erased. So then he sets out on a mission to piece together what happened to him.
Verhoeven’s Total Recall hinged crucially on the fuzzy line between simulation and reality. Dotted with deliberate ambiguities, the film asks us to consider whether the adventures we’re seeing are really happening, or if they’re just fabrications of Quaid’s memory implant. This makes it, pre-Matrix and all that, one of the more clever sci-fi pictures ever produced. Wonderfully hermetic, the film is essentially staging the very deceit of cinema itself, i.e. that none of it is actually happening and it’s all just grossly paid actors reading scripts. In demanding that viewers consider (more-or-less constantly) that Quaid’s extraterrestrial swashbuckling isn’t really “real,” Total Recall worked pretty diligently to undermine the basic fantasy of going to the movies. Add to this Schwarzenegger’s most textured performance to date, the infamous three-breasted Martian stripper (an image that cross-wired the jerk-off fantasies of any kid who saw the film before understanding the basic rudiments of sexual intercourse and female anatomy), excessive gore, even more–excessive one-liners, and you have one of the most exceptional blockbusters ever splattered on the screen. In short: we don’t need another one.
For sure, shooting a $200-million Hollywood action movie in Toronto is good for Toronto. It proves that the city’s infrastructure (and especially Pinewood Studios, where the bulk of the interiors are, reportedly, being shot) can handle such a production. And a good chunk of that goes back into the economy (when we toured Pinewood in April, the studio’s managing director, Edith Myers, told us that for a $180-million production, about $100 million would go back into the local economy). Plus, it’s fun when movies shoot in town, because you might see celebrities and because it gets everyone talking about Total Recall, and then you get to say, “Oh man, you’ve never seen the original?!” and then you drop what you’re doing and watch it. But because the original is so idiosyncratic, self-contained, and darn-near perfect, remaking it seems like sacrilege. But, of course, everyone says that about every favourite movie that gets remade and it doesn’t stop studios from remaking them. If a movie made money once upon a time it stands to reason that it can make money again. So fine, remake Total Recall. And because you’re remaking it, you abstract person-things we keep addressing in the indefinite you, you may as well remake it in Toronto. But what will it look like, exactly?
Well, we haven’t seen much. But we’ve seen enough. And based on who’s involved, it’s easy (and totally fun) to make a few whacky, far-out projections. Total Recall (2012) is being helmed by Len Wiseman, who’s best known for his work on the Underworld series of vampire-versus-werewolf pictures, and whose name has been mud ever since he directed Live Free or Die Hard, which hardcore fanboys scoffed at because it supposedly ruined the first three Die Hard films, but which really wasn’t that bad. The script was written by Kurt Wimmer (who as the director of Equilibirum and Ultraviolet sucks, but as the writer of Law Abiding Citizen and Salt is okay), Mark Bomback (Live Free or Die Hard, Unstoppable), and James Vanderbilt (who wrote maybe the best American film of the 2000s, Zodiac, but also The Rundown and The Losers). Chuck Peter Berg into the mix and you practically have the Dogs Playing Poker of jocky, gym rat, testosterone-drunk directors. (Though, in that respect, these guys would still all have to form together like Voltron to equal half a Zack Snyder.) So, anyway, if we had to guess—and that’s exactly what we’re doing—we’d say that Total Recall 2012 is going to be Ultraviolet meets Live Free or Die Hard with shades of The Losers and a peppering of Salt.
That Wiseman’s film will star Colin Farrell instead of someone built like Arnold Schwarzenegger is telling. It suggests that Total Recall (2012) will not be a brawny action picture: the kind where heroes sock their wives in the face, drill through walls in huge construction vehicles, and rip a man’s arms off his torso while riding an elevator and shouting “ZEE YOU AT DE PAHTY, RICHTER!” This is kind of too bad, because if there was one thing that was great about Wiseman’s Die Hard 4, it was how convincingly beat-up Bruce Willis seemed—the whole “I’m getting too old for this shit” shtick cracking and bruising under the weight of a man who seemed truly too old for this shit. Instead, we’re more likely to see a slick, sleek, ultra-shiny futuristic techno-thriller. And we’re more likely to see, in Farrell, a Doug Quaid wracked by whether or not he’s suffering a psychotic episode. It’s a far cry from Arnold, who more or less barrelled through the film, knowing that indecision is the curse of girly-men, sissy-boys, and the otherwise terminally effete.
This is the kind of thing we can see in all these shots people around town have snapped of someone (presumably Collin Farrell’s stunt double) gripping onto the roof of some futuristic space-car. The closest the original Recall has to anything like its hero being whipped around at the mercy of a service vehicle is the scene in which Schwarzenegger argues with an unnervingly Howdy Doody–looking robotic cabbie, gets pissed off, wrecks the robot, and takes control of the cab himself. If Total Recall is, like Predator (the ultimate beefy action movie, barring maybe the original Conan The Barbarian), about the unstoppable force of pure muscle and strength of will, then Total Recall (2012) is Predator 2, a film that swapped in a kind of acrobatic, Keatonesque survivalism for bulging biceps and muddy, eyeball-to-eyeball showdowns. Even the early official photos of Farrell suggest a hero more interested in thinking his way out of a bind (you can practically see the gears spinning behind his eyes in this shot) than busting out of some hi-tech handcuffs and stabbing the bad guys in the neck.
And this is all fine. Maybe the days of the brawny, cigar-chomping, Schwarzeneggerean action hero are over. (And, besides, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia already staged the whole Predator vs. Transporter debate, so we won’t rehash it here.) But Farrell’s casting is suggestive of far-reaching changes between Verhoeven’s and Wiseman’s Recalls: changes that suggest these are barely the same movie at all. (Indeed, Farrell has noted that, tonally, Wiseman’s film is “less jokey” than Verhoeven’s, which is just another way of saying “less good.” Also, that assessment is stupid. It’s like boasting that you’ve made a less jokey Robocop. Who would care? The whole reason people like it is because it is how it is, not more or less “jokey” or anything else.)
Wiseman’s film, apparently, ditches the Martian plotline entirely. Which means you won’t get to hear Collin Farrell telling himself to “get [his] ass to Mars,” which means why the hell would you even buy a ticket? Instead of setting Quaid up against a Martian mining tyrant bent on uncovering age-old alien secrets, the new Total Recall plops Farrell’s Quaid between rival factions in futuristic Euroamerica and New Shanghai. The Martian mining tyrant, Vilos Cohaagen, becomes the leader of Euroamerica and instead of butting heads with Martian rebels led by a mutant named Kuato, he’s secretly plotting an invasion of New Shanghai. That Bryan Cranston will be playing the role of a Cohaagen (originally played, perfectly, by Ronny Cox) seems to further certify the svelte sleekness of Wiseman’s production design, especially if Cranston maintains his now-trademark Bic-bald Breaking Bad hairdo.
Taken outside the U of T bookstore, near where the film was shooting a few weeks back. Fans of Verhoeven’s original keep the flame alive. Photo by Brian St. Denis from Torontoist’s Flickr pool.
All this is to say, I guess, that Total Recall (2012) will be different. Duh, right? But its difference is being configured across whole new axes, besides its new-ness or its non-jokiness. As a $200-million studio picture, scheduled as a later-summer sci-fi blockbuster extravaganza, Wiseman’s film has the capacity to define what exactly late-period new millennium actions films look like, in the same way that Verhoeven’s Total Recall was the super-budgeted swan song of a certain kind of hefty, practical blockbuster. It’s worth noting that Wiseman’s Total Recall is not being shot, or post-converted, to 3D. At least not yet. (Producer Neil Moritz has said that 3D will be “too much,” but studios and theatre chains usually never balk at “too much” when it comes to upping ticket prices a buck or two for the privilege of wearing 3D glasses.)
Anyhow, if this Total Recall is, mercifully, presented in 2D, it may be the last gasp for kind-of-traditional-but-still-CGI-infused blockbusters that still bother to use actual locations. Locations like U of T. And Roy Thomson Hall. Which means Toronto will get to be part of history in that “Hey, look at us, we’re in the movies!” kind of way. Until then, tweet your favourite Colin Farrell sightings to @torontoist with the #TotalRecall2012 tag for a chance to win a chance to see your tweet on the Internet. I hear he likes hanging around Yorkville. Because people from out of town don’t know any better. Plus he’s rich.
Total Recall is scheduled for release August 3, 2012, which is a pretty hilarious thing to even bother telling you this far in advance.