Now for the etc bit
So I went to see Total Recall last night, and I have to be
honest, I wasn’t expecting much, I pretty much only went to see it because it
has Jessica Biel in it. However, this seems to be one of those rare occasions
when I am wrong. Total Recall is one of the best films I have seen this year,
perhaps a close second to The Avengers. It’s well thought out, visually
excellent and just a lot of fun, think Sci-Fi Bourn Identity. The only thing I
found a little distracting is that you can really tell this film is American,
the anti-English sentiment just oozes out of it. At any rate, if you haven’t
seen it, go and see it now!
WARNING! SPOILERS! Seriously stop reading now if you haven’t
seen it, the next bit will ruin it for you.
For those of you who have seen it here’s what I think of it
in depth. Well, the thing that surprised me was just how well don the film was,
you don’t often see films with this convoluted a plot that are so internally
consistent. Now if I’m honest this film is reasonably easy to second guess,
there’s nothing terribly original in it, though there are some nice clever
bits.
Let’s start at the beginning. I really like this world, I’m
a bit of a fan of dystopian futures and this is one of the best I’ve seen. For
those of you who’ve forgotten, or ignored my spoiler warning , the story takes
place in both the United Federation of Britain, UFB and the Colony, (formally
Australia) these being the only two places that survived the chemical weapons
Holocaust (Nice to see a change from Nuclear). The two countries are connected
by a giant elevator going through the centre of the earth, called the fall. It
actually goes to one side of the core for heat reasons; this makes me slightly
doubtful of the few moments of zero gravity. The earth’s core and inner core
account for about 30% of the earth’s mass so there should still have been a
significant amount of gravity. That said, this is a film and zero gravity makes
for some excellent action sequences, so let’s forgive it.
As I said, the only thing I didn’t like much was the blatant
anti-Englishness of this film. Now, there is some justification for this,
Britain is one of only two countries to survive the end of the world, which I
do like, and one does need a stark divide between goodies and baddies. But
seriously, when his wife turns out to be a secret agent/assassin sent to guard
him, her accent suddenly becomes upper-class English, it’s so blatant it’s
ridiculous. By the way, after she started trying to kill him, did anyone else
suddenly find her a lot sexier, not sure what that says about me.
The basic set up is that the UFB is the home of the rich and
powerful, and the Colony is where the impoverished workers live. There is the
UFB government on one side and the resistance lead by Matthias who are fighting
for independence for the Colony on the other, they are accused of terrorist
attacks at the beginning of the film. In the middle of this is Douglas Quaid
(Collin Farrell). Early on in the film he decides to visit Rekall on the advice
of a co-worker at the droid factory. He chooses a secret agent fantasy, but
when it turns out he really is a secret agent, they must pull the plug before
the conflicting memories destroy his mind. By the way, I thought this was a
clever way of doing it. Then a team of soldiers burst in and arrest him but he
somehow manages to kill them. He then runes home to his wife, but she turns out
to be his secret agent babysitter and tries to kill him as well.
Finding himself on the run, Quaid gets a call from someone
in the UFB to a hidden phone implanted in his hand. The stranger tells him this
call is a failsafe and instructs him to find ‘the Key’ and to remove the phone
in his hand before ringing off and leaving a bank code. Quaid then cuts out the
phone with a broken bottle, this I just do not buy. Cutting yourself hurts, and
pulling an electrical circuit out from under the palm of your hand would simply
not be possible without anesthetic.
Slight unrealism aside, Quaid then goes to the bank where he
finds a safety deposit box with passports, money and a recording of himself
telling him to get to his apartment where he will find more information. Ahem, Born Identity rip off. But it works
well and I can’t blame them for copying a good film since they do a very good
job of it.
Anyway, Quaid goes to the UFB using one of the passports and
a sort of, neck ring that projects an alternate face onto yours, don’t know how
that’s supposed to work or why it begins flickering for no apparent reason, but
it’s a cool idea. So the fake passport fails and he ends up getting chased by
the cops and his wife until Melina (Jessica Biel) shows up in a maglev car,
these I really like, they’re a little reminiscent of Minority Report but better
done. Actually that’s pretty much par for the course with this film, there’s
basically nothing you haven’t seen before in one incarnation or another, but
the execution and quality of this film is of a higher standard than any sci-fi
film I’ve seen before.
After the car chase they go to his apartment where it turns
out he left a hidden message for himself concealed in his piano, he unlockes
this by using a piano ‘Key’ he found in the safe deposit box. This is clever
and nicely set up earlier in the film
when Quaid talks about how he’d like to be able to play the piano,
although I’m not sure it would work in reality. The important thing is that the
message tells him his real name is Carl Hauser, who we know from earlier is the
UFB’s best intelligence operative, but reportedly switched sides. It also
reveals that there is a code to shut down the UBF’s army of robots, and that
this code is locked away somewhere in his subconscious. To be honest I didn’t
see this one coming. That said it is a fairly standard action film plot twist,
but again, it’s very well done.
There’s then a chase through the very fun six directional
elevators. This is the first big action sequence featuring the robotic police,
or Synthetics as the film calls them. FYI if you recognise the guns the robots
use, they were in MW2 I think, they’re a real gun called the KRISS vector and
it has a rather clever recoil redirecting system, very futuristic, so kudos to
Total Recall for that.
After the chase, Melina takes Quaid into the ruins of the
old London underground where it turns out the resistance have re-animated a
tube train, which now I think about it looked like it came from the New York
subway. This train takes them out into the supposedly uninhabitable wastes
outside the safe zone where Matthias is hiding out. Here they attempt to
extract the shutdown code from Quaid’s subconscious, instead they activate some
kind of computer virus hidden in his mind which calls in the UFB. This is the
first time we meet Chancellor Cohaagen in the flesh and he reveals that there
is no kill code and that Quaid is in fact a triple agent and it was Hauser’s
idea to wipe his memory and set himself up as the ultimate deep cover agent,
one who doesn’t even know his real identity, using the recorded messages to
guide his actions.
Now this was predictable, I won’t say I knew it was going to
happen, but I think most people could twig it as a possibility after they saw
the second recording. Either way, after killing Matthias and taking Melina,
Cohaagen tries to re-implant Hauser’s original personality. Again, predictably
Quaid resists, and with a little help from his friend who called him earlier
and directed him to the safe deposit box.
I should at this point say that the evil master plan of the
UFB is to invade the Colony, kill all the inhabitants and replace them with a
workforce of synthetics. I don’t quite get the point of this and it’s rather
ironic, since, when we did have an empire, Australia was one of the few places
we considered not worth the trouble of invading, we used it as a giant prison
instead.
International issues from 200 years ago aside, with no kill
code, Quaid must now rescue Melina and stop the invasion the old fashioned way,
by which I mean with a bag full of explosives. So with the setup well
established, what’s the final action sequence like. The answer is again,
traditional, but very, very good. Lots of explosions and shooting in the
excellent setting of The Fall on the way to invade The Colony. I was quite
impressed with the use of gun recoil to move in zero gravity, and based on a
few quick calculations that I won’t bore you with, it actually looks like a rather
accurate demonstration of the principle of conservation of momentum.
Anyway, after a bit of running around and rescuing Jessica
Biel, we get to the action climax. I was actually rather surprised to see that
after all the explosions and maglev cars and rooftop chases, the action climax
is actually a knife fight between Cohaagen and Quaid, but even more surprising
is that it is believable. It’s not like the end of MI: Ghost Protocol where you
simply do not buy that Tom Cruise could have his hands full in a fight with a
fat Russian scientist. Here though, because Quaid has already been injured by a
black super-synthetic, you can believe that Cohaagen would be a challenging
fight. That said, Jessica Biel’s helicopter is unbelievably useless at
reloading its machineguns. But, despite this, Quiad finally stabs Cohaagen just
as his explosives go off destroying The Fall and with it the danger of a UFB
invasion.
The only slight niggle I have with the ending is the way his
wife turns up at the end impersonating Melina using a holographic head and
tries to kill Quaid. It’s not bad or anything, it’s just a bit unnecessary. She
doesn’t succeed in killing either Quaid or Melina so it changes nothing and I
can’t help thinking it would have been better to just kill her when they got
rid of Cohaagen.
So that’s the story and apart from one or two unanswered
questions like what the UFB’s plan was if his memory hadn’t been reactivated at
Rekall, I can’t fault it. There are no plot holes to speak of and though
convoluted the story is easy to follow and quite well explained. True the
script didn’t give much scope for a showcase of great acting, but that’s not
the point of films like this, the point is the action, which is fantastic. It’s
fast paced but not confusing and the fight scenes strike a nice balance between
absolute reality and the stupidity of things like the Matrix.
So to conclude, if you haven’t seen it, go, now! If you
have, well, this going to be one of the few films I’ll actually buy when it
comes out on DVD.
I give it 4.5/5
