Movie Details
Total Recall (2012)
Director-: : Len Wiseman
Cast-Colin Farrell Bokeem Woodbine Bryan Cranston
Movie type- Action/Sci-fi
Release date- 03 August
IMDB Rating-6.1
Languages- English and Ukrainian
Duration-1 Hour 58 Minutes
Trailer
Synopsis
A remake of Paul Verhoeven’s cult science fiction
Remake, as an idea in itself, is not bad. After all, even some cinema classics can age quite badly, making them not as good to watch as on the day of their premiere. However, it is important that the remake is made carefully – it should not mindlessly copy the original. Instead, he should focus on what interesting things can be added to the old story and which threads can be developed. You can, like the creators of last year’s Fright Night, take only the initial idea and the skeleton of the story from the source material and build something completely new around it. Of course, you can also do the same as in the case of Total Recall , in which, apart from minor details, only the actors and the set design changed.
Instead of Mars, we have a destroyed Earth and two enclaves of humanity in opposite hemispheres connected by an elevator running through the planet’s core. Of course, one of these enclaves is oppressive and the other is oppressed. The main character – Douglas Quaid – lives in the less fortunate one, and spends the time between monotonous work and visits to bad bars with his friend dreaming about “something more”. Then there is a visit to a company that implants false memories, a lot of shootings and fights, a few chases and a few plot twists that are no surprise, because this is exactly what Verhoeven’s film was about.
Not for a momentTotal RecallAD 2012 does not try to let go of the sleeve of its two-decade older brother. So he repeats scenes, motifs and threads, but in almost every case he does it in a worse style. There are several images in the original that are simply imprinted in memory and cannot be thrown away in any way. Much of this is due to the brilliant animatronic special effects and make-up, but also to the director and screenwriter. A prostitute with three breasts, Arnold taking off his mask, Arnold’s eyes popping out of his skull, Arnold saying “consider it a divorce”, pulling out the transmitter through his nose… wherever you go, you can trip over a great scene in this movie. In the new version, almost everything is smoothed out and sexless. When references to the 1990 version appear on screen, they are less subtle than the Red Army liberating its brother republics.
Some things worked out
I derive a lot of pleasure from dealing with science fiction by spotting various interesting concepts and small ideas, so I can’t help but mention a few things that the creators did quite well. Panoramas of multi-level cities look good. Due to the drastic limitation of the available space, the architecture had to climb upwards, and some buildings look as if they were hanging in the air. A plus for the idea and execution. The phone implanted in the hand also looks interesting, as it gains additional functions when placed against any glass surface. There are quite a lot of such little tidbits in the film. You might think that this is the only element that the creators really paid attention to.
I cannot honestly call the new Total Recall a bad film, because it is a good-looking and quite solidly shot production that, to some extent, even managed to retain the ambiguity of the original script. The original, shot by Paul Verhoeven, will be remembered as the pinnacle of classic special effects. The new version is a film so terribly unnecessary, secondary and sometimes boring that its existence can easily be forgotten.
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