Alright, I've seen it. I'll try not to post too many spoilers.
Short review: If you like this sort of thing, then you'll like this sort of thing. If you like summer sci-fi action thrilers with lots of clever gadgets that keep the thrills coming, then you'll like Total Recall. If you're looking for it to be a retelling of The Brothers Karamazov, you'll be disappointed. Yes, the the tri-bosomed harlot does make an appearance. No, they do not travel to Mars.
First of all, the trailers. They're making a second Taken. Taken 2. Liam Neeson appears to have reunited with his wife and daughter, but the criminal syndicate he frakked up in the first Taken, has them all marked for revenge. I know the first movie was popular here at the SOH. I thought sections of it were wildly improbable, but enjoyed it nonetheless. I'm not looking for these things to be Tolstoy. Skyfall, the third 007 movie starring Daniel Craig looks better and better to me. This is the one I'm really looking forward to. I will probably go see The Bourne Legacy next week when it opens.
The new Total Recall takes place on a post-war blasted Earth, of a type that will be immediately familiar to anyone whose read Heavy Metal, Epic Illustrated, or Judge Dredd. A horrific conflict has left large sections of the Earth unihabitable. Life in these "no-zones" is considered impossible. The two remaining focal points of civilization are the Federation of Great Britain, which appears to encompass The United Kingdom and most of Western Europe, and The Colony, Australia. These two mega-cities (I borrow the term freely from Judge Dredd) are linked by what our English members would call a giant subterranean "tube" called "The Fall" by which it is possible to travel from Aus to the UK in 17 minutes. This trip includes a momentary loss of gravity, which becomes important later in the film. The FGB is the seat of government; the Colony provides the cheap labor. The FGB is bright and sunny, while the Colony looks very much like Los Angeles from Blade Runner. Both places are ethnically diverse and deeply integrated racially, but it's clear that the Colonists are meant to represent the "Natives". They have a great many technological diversions, and the Farrell/Beckinsale abode is quite roomy compared to some of the places I've lived, but it's clear the Colonists aren't meant to rise any higher in life. Farrell's "cover" persona builds robot police, but is repeatedly denied promotion in favor of FGB citizens.
There are many nods to the original film in this version that fans will recognize immediately. Many of the actors in the reboot even resemble their 90s counterparts. The sensibility of the film however - and I freely admit this is only my opinion - resembles much more closely that of the Bond reboot, or the Bourne films. The bare bones of the 1990 film are intact, substitute the Colony for Mars, but I often found myself thinking of the Bourne Identity while watching the reboot. Thus we find muscular factory line worker Colin Farrell, living with his fashion-model beautiful wife, Kate Beckinsale, and reading Ian Fleming 007 paperbacks on the tube commuting to work. We know immediately that the clock is ticking until all hell breaks loose. Kate Beckinsale's Laurie is by far my favorite character in this movie. Techinically, she plays a composite of Sharon Stone's and Michael Ironside's characters from the original, and she is plumb mean, as well as being quite resourceful. Jessica Biel's freedom fighter is also quite handy in a scrap, and when the two women tangle, there is no Bad Girls' Club hair-pulling in their fight scenes, it's more like The Ultimate Fighter; these two go full on Thunderdome. The stunt people working on this film should have gotten points on the receipts, because they really earned their bread making this movie. Once Colin Farrell's Hauser learns all is not as it seems, it's one action sequence after another. An aerial "car" chase is especially exiciting to watch. I don't know how much this movie cost to make, but it looks very expensive. I'll be surprised if Total Recall doesn't get Academy Award nominations for visual effects and sound editing. There's also some Sci-Fi gadgetry that is just cool, like the luminescent tattoos, and a cell phone that is a subcuteneously implanted into the palm. As I said at the beginning, if you like this sort of thing, then you'll like this sort of thing.
In my opinion, not nearly as good a film as Blade Runner (I have the Ultimate multi-disc set) and not as good as The Dark Knight Rises, but taken on its own terms, very enjoyable, in the way a roller coaster is enjoyable. Both Total Recalls were based on the Philip K. Dick short story "We'll Remember It For you Wholesale". The central question in the short story is whether the protagonist is really a spy, or is he just going crazy. This is touched on in both the film versions, but I never seriously doubted Hauser's bona fides as a spy/trained killer in either one of them. Whether you like one better than the other is likely to be a matter of taste. I've met fanboys who are simply opposed to remakes of any kind, and refuse to take one on its own terms as a matter of principle, but I'm not inclined to be that doctrinaire. I think many of my fellow nerds take these things WAY too seriously, but that's just me.
I think that's as much as I can say without giving away spoilers.
JAMES
