Towards the end of the movie they discover an ancient alien device capable of terraforming Mars within seconds. Arnold pushes the button and moments before his face blows to pieces there’s breathable atmosphere and he’s saved.
The question that is nagging me all this time: The device was apparently completed and fully functional. Why didn’t the aliens activate it? What were they waiting for? Were they wiped out by some catastrophe just as they were ready to push the button?
I guess decide any answer to that question you want. Maybe the original story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” has more info.
I never read that story, but I’d be surprised if it has much of the Mars plotline - somehow I got the impression it was just a short about the Rekall kind of place where you pay to get an implant of a vacation instead of really going on a trip, that kind of thing.
I have, though, read the novelization by a certain SFF author who does not have the greatest reputation around these parts, coughXantony, and it has a number of parts expanded on from the movie, including an extended scene where Arnold gets more memories from the aliens and why they put the reactor there.
Brief version - they were some sort of long-distance traders, just passing through, who noticed the monkeys over on Earth and thought that they had potential. The reactor was set up as a sort of promotional gift for a potential new trading partner, with a test built in. If natives activated it, then they get a breathable atmosphere on another planet in their solar system, and they could study the reactor in operation to learn the principles it worked on. If they ignored it, then it just say there.
If the reactor was ‘misused’, (like if a few rich natives like the bad guys started poking around its secrets instead of activating it for the good of everybody,) then a boobytrap capable of wiping out all life in the solar system might be activated.
Take that with however much salt you please.
It’s because everything that happens in the movie after Douglas Quaid pays for the implants to have a “virtual vacation” is actually that, his virtual vacation, and so it doesn’t have to be 100% logical.
The story didn’t have anything about the aliens terraforming Mars. It also didn’t actually take place on Mars (though it’s discovered the protagonist had been there in the past.
Other than the basic idea – a man goes to buy memories and discovers they already exist – the story has little in common with the movie, whose main object seemed to be to break every pane of glass that appears in the film.
Thank you sir, having watched and enjoyed the film so many times, I will now be obliged to watch it and have it nag me. Thanks.
I can answer this. It is not in the movie or the original short story, but in the novelization of the movie script by Piers Anthony. At the end of the book it describes how basically the whole thing on Mars was set up as a test and gift for the human race. When they were ready to move on into the universe at large they would be given a leg up by a terraformed Mars and lot of knowledge. It was a kind of Prime Directive sort of thing. Until we reached a certain point of development no our own, they did not want to interfere.
As for the Phillipe K. Dick story:The story plot is similar to the first half (up to him getting some of his memories back and then taking it on the lam), but then:
He forces the government into a Mexican standoff and cuts a deal to get a better set of memories implanted. Instead of being a low class shlub, he will get his greatest unfulfilled fantasy. Psychologists study him and determine his fantasy is to save the world. So they create a memory set to implant that has him saving the world from advanced aliens, but he has to keep it a secret to keep the world safe. When they put him under to implant it, he starts reacting to it before they start the download. It turns out he did save the world from aliens who put a mental block on him as well. His success as a secret agent was because he had access to an undetectable alien super assassination weapon. It ends with the government having to keep him happy for the rest of his life to keep the aliens from every finding out they know what happened.
In all, Dick has some great concepts, but many of his stories, like this one and Minority Report, seem more than a little pulpish by today’s standards.
The movie [B[Total Recall** expends the Philip K. Dick story in the first half hour, tops. After that, they’re winging it, ripping off from other works. I’ve always felt that most of the rest of the story borrows heavily from Robert Sheckley’s The Status Civilization – guy who’s lost his memory on another world,h has deformed mutants who can probe your mind and tell you about your past, and a guy who has to prove himself through physical challenges, and is being chased by people trying to kill him. The end with the atmosphere plant is straight out of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ a Princess of Mars, where the hero must use his last remaining energy to activate the atmosphere plant that will make oxygen for Mars.
Why didn’ the aliens activate the plant, after going through all the trouble of building it? Because it’s just a plot device. If all of this is taking place in Quaid’s mind, it fits even better – it doesn’t have to make any more sense than a videogame, in that case.
as for Piers Anthony’s book, AFAIK he didn’t have any pipeline to the “truth” – they usually work from a script or notes when doing novelizations, and fill in the rest tout of their own imaginations. So Isaac Asimov’s novelization of Fantastic Voyage doesn’t contain any insights from Jerome Bixby, and W.J. Stuart’s book of Forbidden Planet doesn’t have any deep truths from the story notes. Both books, in fact, depart from the films and their concepts. So don’t look for the answer to question about a film in the novelization.*
*there are exceptions. Orson Scott Card’s book The Abyss was created interactively with Cameron’s movie. And Arthur C. Clarke’s novel 2001 was by half the team that wrote the screenplay.
Thanks for the answers!
Is that why there’s a fire axe on Mars? On a planet where all the walls look to be built out of metal? On a planet where you don’t want to break the windows?
Drop of sweat nonwithstanding, eh? I was actually going to start a thread poll on this very topic, along with some other polls spaced out about once a week on other movie controversies.
Please do. I like this movie.
Some of you are assuming the builders of the device breathe air. The machine may be a gift to man . They built it and went home.
It makes me wish I had three hands!
“They were aliens. Who knows what they thought?”
Okay, now wait, seriously. What the hell is a fire axe doing on Mars? If it slipped your mind, check out 4:30 of this YouTube clip.
Was this:
A) A bit of idiocy and oversight by the director?
B) A hint that not everything is realistic so it’s all been a false memory?
C) Fire axes are actually standard pieces of equipment on the ISS.
This.
I don’t know about the ISS, but they are standard equipment on submarines. I don’t see what the big deal is. There are plenty of flammables all over (cloth, plastics, electronics). A fire axe is not meant to chop wood. It is meant to knock open enclosures or break apart flaming material.
Seriously? My mind is reeling. Or realing, given the alignment with reality.
So if a piece of electronic equipment is on fire, you’re trained to hack at it with an axe? To chop through metal bulkheads? Chop up flammable bolts of cloth?
I’m not doubting you, but I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around this. It’s really GQ fodder.