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.
