Set in a high-tech yet shabby future, the remake of Total Recall is a fully realized piece of production design. But its script, credited to six authors, is more like a preliminary sketch.
Directed by Underworld franchise veteran Len Wiseman, the movie retains some elements of Paul Verhoeven’s friskier (and more graphically violent) 1990 original. Yet it also makes lots of changes, notably by downplaying the brain-bending aspects of the scenario in favor of thought-free action. (Also, it never leaves a devastated Earth for Mars.)
Our hero (Colin Farrell) might be Doug, an assembly-line worker who lives in the Colony, which used to be called Australia. He commutes daily — right through the earth’s core, no less — to the only other inhabited part of the planet, a neo-colonialist Britain. Talk about the perils of outsourcing!
When he’s awake, Doug is content with his life, as well as his wife, Lori (Kate Beckinsale, another Underworld franchise veteran, and Wiseman’s spouse). In his recurring dreams, however, Doug is another man altogether. There he travels with another woman, who is eventually revealed to be Melina (Jessica Biel). So Doug goes to Rekall, a company that implants recreational false memories in its customers, in the hope of discovering the basis for his nightly reveries. Rather then being modernistic, the company’s offices look like an upscale Chinese opium parlor. This is a joke that, like much of the movie’s depiction of the Colony, teeters on the verge of being an ethnic slur.
Although it’s what’s left of Australia after a devastating global war, the Colony has a strong Asian character. (In one version of the script, reportedly, it was dubbed “New Shanghai.”) The signs are mostly in Chinese — English, Korean, Russian and Japanese can also be glimpsed — and the rainy weather and teeming tenements suggest 1960s Hong Kong, only with more hookers and robot cops.