Total Recall

It is the year 2084. Every night construction worker Douglas Quaid has a recurring dream that he is on Mars with a beautiful woman. He goes to the Recall laboratories, who offer a hallucinogenic drug that can implant the false memory of an adventurous trip into anybody’s mind. But something goes wrong, and suddenly Quaid’s life is no longer the same: his friends turn out to be foes, his wife is, in fact, an enemy agent and Quaid is pursued by a relentless team of killers. Or is it all a side effect of the Recall procedure? Quaid travels to Mars to find out.

Paul Verhoeven’s second American movie uses Philip K. Dick’s novella “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” as the basis for a wild thrill ride pumped up with action, violence and (for their time) state-of-the-art special effects. Arnold Schwarzenegger delivers one of his best screen performances under Verhoeven’s direction, delivering the kind of movie expected from the movie star, while also being complex and ambiguous with elements of humour and an over the top presentation of violence that works as a satirisation of action pictures of the era.