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Total Recall: Extreme Escapism for Fun and Profit
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Science Fiction Film Club
Total Recall: Extreme Escapism for Fun and Profit
“Now this is the plan: Get your ass to Mars.”
By Kali Wallace
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Published on November 12, 2025
Credit: Tri-Star Pictures
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Credit: Tri-Star Pictures
Total Recall (1990). Directed by Paul Verhoeven. Written by Ronald Shusett, Dan O’Bannon, and Gary Goldman, based on the story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” by Philip K. Dick. Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rachel Ticotin, Sharon Stone, Michael Ironside, and Ronny Cox.
Philip K. Dick died just a few months before the release of Blade Runner (1982). The film had been in development for quite a while, long enough for Dick to shift from extreme skepticism about a film adaptation of his work to appreciation of the scenes he was able to screen before his death. In a 1981 letter to the production company, Dick wrote, “…I can only say that I did not know that a work of mine or a set of ideas of mine could be escalated into such stunning dimensions.”
He wouldn’t live to see the finished film, nor to see his body of work go on to inspire several other major films, which would in turn influence the themes and aesthetics of science fiction across all media for decades to come, with their gritty visions of the future, anxiety about technology, and paranoia regarding what’s going on in our own minds. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner was the first of those films, and Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall (1990) was the second, although both began their long cinematic journeys at about the same time, with film producers optioning the source material in the early 1970s. It just took a little while for Total Recall to make it through a long and twisty production path and finally arrive on screen.
Dick’s short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” was published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1966, and film producer Ronald Shusett acquired the option to film it in 1974. At the time Shusett had exactly one film to his name (a 1974 thriller called W, starring the iconic ’60s model Twiggy), but some time during that same year he would watch a weird little sci fi student film that piqued his interest: John Carpenter’s Dark Star (1974). After seeing Dark Star,Shusett made the acquaintance of Carpenter’s co-screenwriter, Dan O’Bannon, and the two would go on to develop the story that would eventually become Alien (1979). During that same time, they were also working on adapting “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” into a film, although they had some trouble figuring out how to make it work.
I know I almost always come into these articles saying that I haven’t read (or recently re-read) the source material for a film adaptation, so you might be pleasantly surprised to learn that in this case I did my homework. I went back to reread “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” because I was curious about the story troubles the screenwriters ran into over the years. (I haven’t seen the 2012 Total Recall starring Colin Farrell, but I do know that it credits the 1990 movie, not the Dick story, as its source material.)
The original text tells the story of a man name Douglas Quail who really wants to go to Mars, even though his nagging wife mocks him for this dream. Quail decides that since he can’t afford a real vacation on Mars, he’ll get an artificial one instead. He goes to a company called Rekal, Inc. to have memories of an exciting trip as an interplanetary secret agent implanted in his mind. During the procedure, however, the technicians discover that he already has real memories of having committed a political assassination on Mars, and somebody else has covered them up.
The folks at Rekal naturally want nothing to do with this, so they send Quail on his way. But other secret agents realize—via a telepathic plasma worm in his brain, naturally—that Quail might start to remember being a political assassin, so they confront him. He first tries to flee, but eventually he proposes that they cover up his memory with something else—with his most vivid and powerful daydream, so that he stops obsessing over Mars. They agree and go into his mind to implant a false memory of Quail saving the world from an alien invasion—only to discover that he already remembers that, because it’s also real.
That’s where the story ends. It’s all so very Philip K. Dick, with its themes about memory, identity, and the anxiety of not being able to trust what’s in our own minds and realizing that the mundane world around us is hiding something more sinister. But it’s also very brief, with an abrupt twist ending very typical of ’60s sci fi short fiction. Quail never goes to Mars; the story mostly takes place in offices and cars on Earth. There are no details about Martian politics. There are no Martian mines, no mutants, no rebels fighting against colonial oppressors, no three-breasted sex workers. No romance and very little action.
All of that stuff was added in when Shusett and O’Bannon realized they needed to expand the story to have a full-length movie. But their expansion had some significant problems, as nobody could agree on how the movie should end. They first tried to pitch the movie to Disney—this was during Disney’s early ’80s pivot to older audiences and live action—but Disney didn’t want it, so they took it to De Laurentiis Entertainment. You might recall that De Laurentiis was making a go at big, expensive sci fi in the early ’80s, as they imagined David Lynch’s Dune (1984) as a way to capitalize on the sci fi popularity spurred by the likes of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.
The first director attached to Total Recall would be David Cronenberg, so we can add can add this movie to the ever-growing list of films that Cronenberg didn’t direct but that I will absolutely seek out if I ever acquire the ability to view movies from alternate universes. But having a director on the film only made the script problems worse, as Cronenberg rewrote the film’s ending several times and could not come up with a version that made everybody happy. According to Cronenberg, his versions took the script closer to the original Dick story, whereas Shusett wanted something more along the lines of the action and humor of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). They could not come to an agreement about the film’s tone or ending, so Cronenberg eventually quit. Around the same time production stalled, in part because Dune ended up being a financial disaster for De Laurentiis. The company went bankrupt in 1988, having already spent a ton of time and money trying and failing to turn Total Recall into a movie.
Enter Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had been interested in the film for a few years but had never been able to convince Dino De Laurentiis to consider him for the lead role. Part of the problem, of course, was that the main character is imagined as a sort of sad-sack everyman, and Schwarzenegger’s on-screen persona in the ’80s was about as far from that as it is possible to be. But he had massive sci fi star power from James Cameron’s Terminator (1984), and he had been able to cross over into campy comedy with Ivan Reitman’s Twins (1988). (Fun movie fact: Prior to that, nobody thought Schwarzenegger could do anything but the most serious shoot-’em-up action. He and Reitman and co-star Danny DeVito all signed on to Twins with an agreement to take no upfront salary and instead take a share of the profits. It ended up being wildly successful, making them all approximately one bajillionzillion dollars, or thereabouts.)
When De Laurentiis went bankrupt and Total Recall went on the market, Schwarzenegger called up some buddies at independent production studio Carolco, which at the time was a very big name in movies that mostly consist of people shooting lots of guns, i.e., the first few Rambo films. He convinced them to take on Total Recall, with the intention of approving the rewrites and starring in it himself.
It was also Schwarzenegger’s idea to bring on Paul Verhoeven as director, because he, like everybody else, had loved Verhoeven’s ultra-violent, satirical RoboCop (1987). Verhoeven was skeptical about doing another effects-heavy sci fi story, but he liked the mind-fuckery of Total Recall enough to sign on. That meant adding another cook to a kitchen that already had quite a lot of cooks, especially when Verhoeven brought in screenwriter Gary Goldman (whose one previous writing credit was John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China [1986]) to work the dozens of existing versions of the story into a working script.
There are so many reasons why none of this should have worked. A screenwriting team that had failed to find a satisfactory ending to the movie for over a decade. A big-name action star backseat-driving the entire production. A studio known for making movies that are synonymous with the “a man with a gun shoots a lot of people” genre. A director whose favorite part of the story happens inside the main character’s mind.
So often in Hollywood, when there are that many big opinions and big personalities pulling in different directions, the result is a muddled, chaotic mess. It would have been so easy for Total Recall to end up as a mess.
But it didn’t. Total Recall is a great movie. Yes, it’s brash and loud and wildly over-the-top. Yes, it might all take place inside the main character’s mind as some self-indulgent delusion of grandeur. Yes, it’s very much a cinematic last gasp of the extravagant sci fi of the ’80s, right down to the color palette and gruesome special effects. And yes, absolutely nobody involved at any stage of the process knew anything about Martian geology and atmosphere.
Who cares? It’s weird, campy, violent, and so fucking fun.
Oh, and another thing: It’s also an incredibly well-made movie.
The acting is solid precisely because everybody knows when to match the over-the-top tone. Schwarzenegger is clearly having the time of his life, Sharon Stone is also enjoying herself as the hot-and-cold fake wife/secret agent Lori, and Michael Ironside and Ronny Cox are delightful villains. Roy Brocksmith makes a brief but memorable appearance as Dr. Edgemar, the man who tries to convince Quaid that the whole ordeal is in his mind. All of the performances are turned up beyond what is natural, but it works, because so is everything else about the film.
When Verhoeven signed on, he brought along with him a lot of the crew from RoboCop. Among them was special effects artist Rob Bottin, whose name you are probably not surprised to see here—not if you were also looking at the character make-up effects of the Martian mutants and thinking, “Huh, I’m feeling disturbed and fascinated in a very familiar way.” It should be familiar, because Bottin is the guy who did the creature effects in The Thing (1982). His style is so delightfully distinctive.
Total Recall was made right at the boundary between when elaborate practical effects fell out of fashion and more convincing CGI became possible. And I mean right at the boundary: James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), also from Carolco Pictures, was entering post-production when Total Recall was in the theaters.
Total Recall’s visual effects are almost entirely practical. Bottin’s mutants and many of the character effects are a combination of make-up, prosthetics, puppets, and models. The character of Kuato is a puppet grafted onto the body of actor Marshall Bell. (Aside: I can’t be the only one who noticed that every single character in the film pronounced “Kuato” differently.) The Martian landscapes and vistas are a combination of matte paintings and miniatures. I especially love the huge, gorgeous model of the city sitting in the Martian surface. They built that entire underground glacier setting, where Quaid and Melina (Rachel Ticotin) turn on the alien reactor, at different scales on different sets. They even built a real (small-scale) mountain to blow up at the end. The model was apparently so big, and the explosion so grand in scale, they had to film it in an agricultural hall at the Ventura County Fairground. I understand that there are cost and safety considerations, but I think more movies should build mountains and blow them up at the fairgrounds.
The Total Recall special effects crew did make use of some state-of-the-art (at the time) computer effects—or at least, they tried to. In a 2015 interview with members of the production, visual effects supervisor Eric Brevig and CGI director Tim McGovern talk about how they tried to use motion capture technology to create a digital animation of the scene in which Quaid and others move through the X-ray walkway. Motion capture is used all the time for movies and video games now, but in the late ’80s it was being used primarily for movement analysis in medicine and sports (for purposes like tracking movement recovery after surgery or analyzing a golfer’s swing). McGovern’s attempts at using it didn’t quite work out the way he wanted, but they did use the motion-captured shots as references for the X-ray skeleton animation.
Verhoeven has always maintained that the movie can be interpreted as Quaid’s lived reality or as a heroic daydream that exists entirely in his head. Both interpretations are intentional. In a 2016 interview, Verhoeven said, “…I felt that it was—if you want to use a very big word—post-modern. I felt that basically I should not say ‘This is true, and this not true.’”
He’s also been pretty clear that he prefers the “dream” interpretation because he finds it more interesting, which is not at all surprising. Of course the director behind RoboCop and (years later) Starship Troopers (1997) is most interested in the version of the story that’s about the alluring but ultimately hollow fantasy of acting out extreme violence in service of heroism. It’s almost like he has a favorite theme for his politically-minded sci fi satires…
That’s what makes Total Recall so great: It is a very smart movie wrapped in the costume of a very dumb movie. It’s a bombastic action movie about an ordinary guy who dreams of being important, only to find out that he is important; he’s a badass secret agent, he’s turned against the powerful to help the powerless, he helps the downtrodden and saves the planet and gets the girl. It’s also a movie about the very nature of that kind of violent heroic daydream, about the commercialism that sells the mirage of excitement because people are too busy working to experience real excitement, about imagining planetary exploration as colonial exploitation, about the fantasy that a tough guy can shoot a whole lot of people to save the day.
It’s one of the rare films that succeeds as both an over-the-top action movie and as a razor-sharp critique of the genre, and it does that all while being fast-paced and funny and a lot of fun.
What do you think about Total Recall? I’ve always been sort of vaguely fond of this film, even with the stupid eyeball decompression stuff, and I think I like it even more now. Also, I had not known until researching that Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002)—a movie I also like quite a lot—began life as a Total Recall sequel. But we’ll get into that some other time.[end-mark]
Next week: Let’s watch another movie about a man imagining working-class revolution and beautiful women on Mars. This one is just a little bit older. Watch Yakov Protazanov’s 1924 silent film Aelita on Kanopy, Indieflix, Amazon, Klassiki, as well YouTube, the Internet Archive, and other free video sites.
The post <i>Total Recall</i>: Extreme Escapism for Fun and Profit appeared first on Reactor.
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