Total Recall discussion (spoilers)

[YogSosoth]

Anyone watch this? From the box office, it didn't seem like it, but I enjoyed it. The original was kind of a cheesy sci-fi and in the remake, they seemed to try to class it up a bit and make it into a more epic and serious film. There wasn't much humor throughout and the ending change was...I don't know, I'm still digesting it

Spoilers after the break

One thing they didn't really get into much which was kind of a gaping plot hole was the whole deal with the Fall. Apparently the rest of the earth's covered in some chemical gas due to some war and only the UK and Australia exists as human habitations, with the UK being the main one and Australia being the colony. The Fall goes right through the center of the earth from one side to the other and is supposed to be the only mode of transportation between the two places.

Yet later on during the attack on Matthias' compound, we see perfectly functional planes fly into the toxic gas. Something tells me that it takes much more energy and engineering skills to drill a hole through the freaking earth than to simply fly from England to Australia. I dunno, just a hunch. The fact that it connects the UK and Australia means that it was probably built after the war. With the Colony being the ghetto of the earth at this point, why would they care about using all that engineering power to connect skid row and Beverly Hills? It doesn't make sense

It also doesn't make any sense that Laurie, the #2 badass employed by the Chancellor has known and heard all of these things about our hero, Carl Hauser, but has no idea what he looked like. You'd think that in the few months since she's been pretending to be his wife, she would have looked him up, maybe run a face match. Even owning to the fact that Chancellor Hal from Malcolm in the Middle erased the data, you'd think a war hero so close to the current king of the UK would have his face on a few newspapers

I miss the whole deal with aliens and Martians. I wanted bug-eyes and air on Mars, but at least we got the 3 boobed prostitute. And I like the distraction of the old lady at the checkpoint, she even looked like Arnold's disguise! But if that holographic neck thing can only be programmed with a few phrases, how the heck did Laurie basically predict a whole conversation with Carl at the ambulance in the end? And no Kuato? Blasphemy! But at least you had Victor from Underworld but I don't think he's a vampire in this movie

I liked the action, the set pieces were inventive, and at least once you'll wonder if what you're seeing is the "real" world or just another distraction. How did the double agent, the one that gave Carl the message about finding the key, die? From my viewing, he secretly cut the strap on Carl's right hand, then Carl kind of knocked him down and took down everyone, yet when we see him again he's on the Carl's left and was shot. I thought Carl knocked him down to remove suspicion and the guy would just sorta make half-assed efforts to grab him but I didn't see him get shot at all

The whole plot with ovepopulation and Chancellor Hal's plan of destroying the Colony to build another Beverly Hills was just kind of dumb, like how supervillains would put the hero in an excruciatingly slow killing device and leave the room instead of shooting them in the head. They couldn't build up? And where were they going to get all of their manual labor if the colonists were killed? Synthetics were only used for guard duty but if they could build themselves, they wouldn't have needed Carl and Harry and those guys at the factory

They really screwed up the standoff though. In the original, the bad guy pretending everything was still in Arnold's mind was nervous and sweated and never had the upper hand. That's why it was tense. In this version, Jessica Biel cried....so what? If reality was fake, couldn't Carl just think his mind is making her do that? And Harry had the gun on her! Why didn't he just shoot her? And his explanation about why his wife was in his "dream" didn't make sense either if she was there to calm him. Why were the imaginary police in his imaginary mind holding her back if she couldn't die and wasn't real? Why did Harry enter with a bulletproof vest? Why???

Other than that, it was enjoyable. Don't think when you watch this. You'll end up posting a rambling thread on a message board that makes you dislike the movie with every sentence....

[jrepka]

That's Chancellor Walter White from Breaking Bad, if you don't mind!

I liked it better than the original, but I didn't like the original that much. I agree with you about The Fall, though my take was that it would have been technologically easier by many orders of magnitude to clean up the air on the whole planet than to drill a transportation system through Earth's core.

Also the I thought that the ending could have been more explicitly like Inception, where he's left to question whether any of these experiences are real.

[alphaboi867]

I saw the remake this weekend. I hated it. The only thing it has going for it over the original were the special effects. I agree the gravity train idea is stupid (& why does it have windows). The action scenes were over the top and too many. Also the remake lacks the ambiguity of the original. It strongly leans towards the events being real, as opposed to a Rekall vacation. Oh, and the Quaids' apartment was surprisingly nice for a slum (other than the view). Are Australia & Great Britain even antipodes?

[Onomatopoeia]

Originally Posted by jrepka

That's Chancellor Walter White from Breaking Bad, if you don't mind!

That's Chancellor Heisenberg to you, bud.

[magnusblitz]

Originally Posted by YogSosoth

The Fall goes right through the center of the earth from one side to the other and is supposed to be the only mode of transportation between the two places. ... Something tells me that it takes much more energy and engineering skills to drill a hole through the freaking earth than to simply fly from England to Australia.

Even if I can swallow that it was somehow feasible enough to make the elevator, it left me with two major questions:

1) What's to stop Britain from just getting on airplanes and invading Australia a day later? They still have their human army (and possibly some of the robots).

2) How the heck does the thing spin so that people go in right-side-up and come out right-side-up? You could swap one level on a circle inside the tower, but the whole thing is supposed to be level after level - there's no way to swap the outside levels in a tube-shaped elevator.


It's been a long time since I saw the original, and I don't remember it very well, but I remember the original as more enjoyable just because it had more crazy "what the hell is that" moments and kept you guessing more whether what was happening was real or not. This one felt pretty easy to guess what was going on.

[obfusciatrist]

This is what bothered me about the fall, and I'd ignore it, but they made a production out of the gravtiy. Maybe I'm wrong about this, but is this not correct:

There are two options in how the fall works:

1. The tube is a vacuum and it just relies on freefall (if so, I think the speed is way off as, if I used the right calculator I think it would take 24 minutes to freefall to the center of the earth and then another to decelerate back to the surface). But if that is the case then the passengers would be in zero g during the entirety of the drop until being caught at the other end, right?

2. The vehicle is accelerated through the tunnel. But if this is the case the direction of gravity while waiting for launch would have been downward but then immediately switched direction once they started moving, switched again when deceleration begin, and then switched again when they stopped at the other end.


Anyway, I didn't particularly care for the movie. Some of the technology was cool but the old idea of "I'm shooting myself so I can blame it on you" game feels awfully tired.

[JohnT]

My wife couldn't stand it, I thought it was OK. Did not like the three-breast prostitute - it was stupid in the first iteration, it was even worse in this one.

Didn't bother to figure out the faults in the Fall as I figured if the filmmakers didn't care, neither should I.

[YogSosoth]

Did anyone else think it was silly that a dentist like Tim Whatley (yes I'm changing it again) could even be a physical threat to Colin Farrell? I mean come on! I know they were both soldiers in the war, but those punches should have been bouncing off Farrell's chest like pudding thrown against a wall

[jrepka]

Originally Posted by YogSosoth

Did anyone else think it was silly that a dentist like Tim Whatley (yes I'm changing it again) could even be a physical threat to Colin Farrell? I mean come on! I know they were both soldiers in the war, but those punches should have been bouncing off Farrell's chest like pudding thrown against a wall

He was in pretty good shape when he was Buzz Aldrin and went through astronaut training (in From the Earth to the Moon; a bit more obscure, I'll stop here)...

[alphaboi867]

Originally Posted by magnusblitz

...1) What's to stop Britain from just getting on airplanes and invading Australia a day later? They still have their human army (and possibly some of the robots).

2) How the heck does the thing spin so that people go in right-side-up and come out right-side-up? You could swap one level on a circle inside the tower, but the whole thing is supposed to be level after level - there's no way to swap the outside levels in a tube-shaped elevator...

They probally don't have enough long rang aircraft to pull that off; plus there' a power vacuum now that Chancellor Cohaagen is dead. I think only the passenger cabins rotate, not the whole elevator. Things are probally going to suck for all the Colonial workers now trapped in the UFB and vice versa.

[leahcim]

Originally Posted by YogSosoth

....but at least we got the 3 boobed prostitute.

This is the one answer I was looking for before I bought my ticket to see whether it was worth going.

[Spoke]

It wasn't a bad movie, just not the great movie I was hoping for.

While I liked the original, I thought it had a number of flaws. I was hoping this film would keep the good (e.g.,
the sense of humor) and fix the bad (some poor casting and overacting in the original).

The bad:

Unfortunately, the remake has almost no sense of humor. There were a couple of winking nods to the first film, but beyond that, nothing.

While I enjoy a good chase scene as much as the next guy, this movie sometimes felt like just a string of chase scenes. The audience isn't given much of a chance to get to know this future world except while running or driving through it at high speeds. Which is a shame, because it looked potentially interesting. I guess the first movie had a lot of chases, too, but it just didn't feel as frenetic as this one.

The director made a mistake by making it really unequivocal that Farrell's character was not dreaming up everything while he sat in a chair at Rekall. Once you have a scene between Kate Beckinsale and Bryan Cranston where Farrell is not present, you have established conclusively that this is reality and not a dream. The first movie carefully preserved the possibility that it was all a Rekall memory implant gone wrong.

The good:

Better cast than the first film. A shame they weren't better served by the script.

Great art direction. They created some fascinating and immersive visuals.

Anyway, it's worth seeing. The richly-imagined visuals alone would make it worth the ticket for me. I just wish the script had been better.

[Jack Batty]

I just saw it over the weekend. As I said to my daughter, if someone had come up with this movie as an original idea, it would have been fantastic. The problem is that there was source material and a previous movie that put a microscope over the whole thing ... and I just couldn't shake that.

[mlees]

Originally Posted by Spoke

The director made a mistake by making it really unequivocal that Farrell's character was not dreaming up everything while he sat in a chair at Rekall. Once you have a scene between Kate Beckinsale and Bryan Cranston where Farrell is not present, you have established conclusively that this is reality and not a dream. The first movie carefully preserved the possibility that it was all a Rekall memory implant gone wrong.

No, off the top of my head, I can recall a couple scenes in the '90 film that also do this:

In the first: Richter makes a call from Earth to Cohaagen to keep him updated, and Quaid is not present to hear the call.

The second is set in Coohagen's office, on Mars, where Cohaagen chews out Richter. Quaid is not present.

[RikWriter]

I personally hated the first iteration of this movie and was hoping this one would be better. Given the reviews, I think I'll wait till it comes out on DVD.

[TBG]

It was alright, but inferior to the original in most ways.

Biggest problem, everything so dark, and the camera always moving around, made it hard to really take in what was happening.

Didn't really care for some of the plot changes, but if it was a brand new movie instead of a remake it probably wouldn't have been such a big deal.

Have to wonder where the three boobed woman came from though. There didn't seem to be a mutant race in the new movie, so what the hell was that other than an out of place nod to the original?

[Morbo]

Originally Posted by mlees

No, off the top of my head, I can recall a couple scenes in the '90 film that also do this:

In the first: Richter makes a call from Earth to Cohaagen to keep him updated, and Quaid is not present to hear the call.

The second is set in Coohagen's office, on Mars, where Cohaagen chews out Richter. Quaid is not present.

There's a bunch of scenes where Quaid isn't there in the original - Richter kissing Sharon Stone and saying "Not a chance." Richter and the other guy saying "I don't blame you, I wouldn't want a guy like that screwing my old lady." Richter and co shooting at the rat with the bug in the chocolate. Cohaagen deciding that he has to kill Quaid. "You have to make a decision sir...about Goddamn time." and then he knocks over the goldfish. Shots of the residents of Venusville looking at the fan slowing down. Sharon stone playing tennis before Quaid come into the room. A couple where he's unconscious - where Recall talks about putting him in a cab, and where Melina and Sharon Stone fight...

[Gangster Octopus]

I saw this for $5 and I thought it was ok, I was never bored. I am sure if I had to pay $10 I would have hated it.

[mlees]

Originally Posted by Morbo

There's a bunch of scenes where Quaid isn't there in the original - Richter kissing Sharon Stone and saying "Not a chance." Richter and the other guy saying "I don't blame you, I wouldn't want a guy like that screwing my old lady." Richter and co shooting at the rat with the bug in the chocolate. Cohaagen deciding that he has to kill Quaid. "You have to make a decision sir...about Goddamn time." and then he knocks over the goldfish. Shots of the residents of Venusville looking at the fan slowing down. Sharon stone playing tennis before Quaid come into the room. A couple where he's unconscious - where Recall talks about putting him in a cab, and where Melina and Sharon Stone fight...

All that off the top of your head!?

*bows to your greatness*

[Morbo]

Originally Posted by mlees

All that off the top of your head!?

*bows to your greatness*

Heh - not only do I own the DVD but I just watched it a few days ago with someone who had never seen it.

[friedo]

I thought it was aggressively mediocre. The main problem is the same as a lot of action movies these days: they take themselves far too seriously. The original reveled in its own ridiculousness, and was a competent action movie on top of that. This was just a highly-stylized two hour chase/fight scene with the occasional pause for some awkward exposition.

It was mildly enjoyable, though.

They got the physics of the gravity train totally wrong.

ETA: Of course, the original got the physics of suffocating in the martian atmosphere wrong. But Arnold's eyes popping out of his head is an all-time classic image.

[Qadgop the Mercotan]

It was a complete waste of my time. And rehashing why that is so in this thread is just perpetuating said waste. So...

[dzeiger]

I was continually amazed by the inability of the government to actually shut anything down when chasing the heroes. You'd think an electromagnetic highway system would have a way to shut down the cars, and you'd think that if they're in a building elevator system, they'd be able to stop the elevators. (and that latter scene just screamed GalaxyQuest to me)

[grude]

Originally Posted by friedo

The original reveled in its own ridiculousness, and was a competent action movie on top of that. This was just a highly-stylized two hour chase/fight scene with the occasional pause for some awkward exposition.

Not only that but the over the top nature of the film only helped to fuel the central question, is this real or a wish fulfillment fantasy?

The original is one of my favorite sci fi films, it is the perfect balancing of fun and plot.

[CalMeacham]

I went alone last night. I was curious.


1.) as I remarked about the original, it claims to be base on Philip K. Sick's story "We can Remember you for it wholesale", but they really do exhaust all of Dick's material in the first twenty minutes or so. Thereafter, they steal stuff from other places, and I claim most of the original film is lifted without attribution from Robert Sheckley's The Status Civilization (hero who's had his memory wiped. Finds himself in dangerous situation, often has people with guns coming after him to kill him. City ghetto with deformed mutatnts. Some mutants can read minds. Hero finds out his lost memory and his worst enemy is -- himself! And more) The end, with the oxygen-making machine, they stole from "A Princess of Mars"

2.) the new one tries to make things grittier and "more realistic" (so they replace a trip to Mars with a daily 17 minute commute through the center of the earth!!! Right!) Making Quaid's everyday reality pretty griim is actually a good touch, because you really can understand someone wanting to leave this drab existence for a different one, unlike the original's And I hate the poured concrete Brutal architecture, anyway, so it's a great choice.

3.) I the original story (and, if you pay attention, in the scripts for both films) Rekall is selling memopries, but both films turn into virtua reality/dreamlike real-time fantasies. Well, I guess nobody's pay for us to watch Schwartzeneggar or Farrel just remembering things. But then why not simply change the scripts to say that these are implanted dreams?

4.) The hero in Dick's story was supposed to be an everyman nebbish. Someone suggested Woody Allen as a type for this (and it's interesting to speculate what the film would've looked like in that case). But it changed when they got Schwarzeneggar. Still, Farrel is closere to Everyman. Incidentally, the hero of the story was named Quayle. They changed it because that was the Veep's name when the film was made. They coulda changed it back.

5.) I thought the effects were pretty good, but there was a haze of unreality about it that told you it wasn't real. Pepper Mill, watching scenes on TV, broke out with "That looks fake!"

6.) They really didn't need that whole "commuting through the earth" thing, but they apparently kept it because it was SF cool, and becayuse it gave them te opportunity for that zero G battle scene. There is so much wrong with the whole idea that I am paralyzed by my wanting to say them all at once, and it'd bore you anyway. Suffice it to say that there are scads of reasons it wouldn't work, and in the number of things they got wrong if you actually miraculously had it working. But just consider this -- if you had a magical device that had a zero G portioon of the ride, even if you had people strapped down, would you have big open spaces that could become lethal falls if anyone got out? That's like sticking a guillotine on the back of your roller coaster car on the grounds that nobody would ever be able to get out of their seats to use it anyway.

7.) Combining the Sharon Stone and the Michael Ironside roles in a single character is a good move, although it reduces the body count by one. we don't really need both characters, and it gives us more Kate Beckinsale to see.

8.) The triple-breasted hooker, which reinforced the "deformed mutants" idea in the first flick, makes absolutely no sense here 9except in a weak way in that people get their bodies altered, but the whole "glowing phone in the hand" thing is foreshadowed by the "glowing tattoos" earlier. And the boobs thing doesn't relate to anything else in the film. Still, I'm in favor of more topless three-boobed women in films, so i'm not going to complain too much.

[Spoke]

In spite of all its flaws, I'd still give it a 5 or so out of 10. Not great, or particularly memorable, but it is still better than most of the crap that gets foisted on the movie-going public.

[KneadToKnow]

I found the film a tolerable action flick but in great need of more mind-screwing*, and I did not read the thread closely, so forgive me if others have already made this point:

The Fall does not go "through the center of the earth," but rather along a chord through the mantle, admittedly close enough to the core apparently that they get a good light show. As pointed out above, Britain and Oz aren't antipodes. There are several shots of a "you are here" type graphic that show this in the film.


*I was very much hoping for a post-credits scene where he opens his eyes back in Rekall and the whole thing has been the memories they just gave him of being a secret agent.

[CalMeacham]

The Fall does not go "through the center of the earth," but rather along a chord through the mantle, admittedly close enough to the core apparently that they get a good light show. As pointed out above, Britain and Oz aren't antipodes. There are several shots of a "you are here" type graphic that show this in the film.

I know, but it's really a trivial detail in terms of its plausibility -- it STILL wouldn't work, dewspite not going through the molten core.

And I knew ythis, but "through the center of the earth" is catchier and displays my scorn a lot better than beinf strictly accurate would have.



(Not to mention that his whole "antigravity" thing seems to be based on his idea of going throuigh the center. And don't start with a discussion of the physics of that -- because he's already shown in the other scenes that the physics doesn't follow reality. And you can't blame it on being a dream because "The Fall" exists in Quaid's "real" life)

[Alan Smithee]

I remember liking it in the theater, but when I got home there was an email from my phone telling me that I hated it.