Total Recall (2012)

[Goaty]

If it's a dream, why does so much happen outside the experience/POV of the main character?  Some of it even happens while he's unconscious, and at no point in the film does he ever discover what happened when he was out cold even though it informs how events unfold, like the bit in Recall HQ where the techs twig that he's been implanted with false memories and then wipe his recent memory and bung him in a taxi.  The dream angle doesn't actually hold up to logical examination, the only real argument in its favour being that the rest of TR is so dumb it makes as much sense as anything else, though by this rationale every action film is the dream of the central protagonist.

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That's fine you give option and stick with it.

But this ending was "Was it or not?" as if you can recalled, as when Arnie about to get Total Recall, you can see the things on the monitor, with his choice of trip to Mars, including the option of being a secret agent and discovering alien technology, and choice of woman, with pictures of Mars mountain AND Alien Ice Air Rector on the monitor as he fell sleep...
so was it all real or dream? I don't know... that what I like about this film.

[Ancient Otter]

According to Paul Verhoven in the commentary on a DVD:

[spoiler]The bit at the end where everything fades to white? That is Douglas Quaid undergoing a lobotomy. His whole adventure is a implanted memory going wrong.[/spoiler]

Love that film. The scenes set on Earth at the start? Shot in Mexico City - the city area with the escalators was an military officers training academy. Don't know what the Rekall building really was though.

[Professor Bear]

If it is a dream Quaid is having, why do we see his wife talking to someone after he's left the room?  How do we see the Recall salesman having a natter with a customer in another room when Quaid is having a freakout elsewhere?  Wouldn't Quaid know he was seeing other people's experiences and know it was a dream?  The stuff on the screen in Recall HQ is more easily explained away as coincidence, or an in-joke, or even as dis/information, as Quaid is later talking to some nameless schmoe on a train who's able to tell him there are alien artifacts inside the Martian pyramid - the artifacts are a known quantity long before Quaid gets into the chair at Recall, and it would make sense for someone making believable fantasies to include stuff like that in the simulation.

But it's probably a bad idea to get hung up on the internal logic of an Arnie flick, isn't it?

/retunes blarn horn

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[JOE SOAP]

But it's probably a bad idea to get hung up on the internal logic of an Arnie flick, isn't it?

Tis but you could lazily say the whole thing's a dream and therefore nothing needs logical explanation.

/retunes blarn horn

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Cease and Desist Order for audio infringement.

Zimmer-Horn © MMXII

[Beaky Smoochies]

There wasn't a twist at the end of Total Recall - he wasn't dreaming.

According to Paul Verhoven in the commentary on a DVD:
[spoiler]The bit at the end where everything fades to white? That is Douglas Quaid undergoing a lobotomy. His whole adventure is a implanted memory going wrong.[/spoiler]

I always thought he was dreaming, and Verhoeven said in an interview once that the whole 'is he/isn't he' was the hook that interested him in the whole project, a study in psychosis or so he said.  Even when we witness events that Quaid isn't present for, well, he's DREAMING them isn't he...!?

Fuck you man! Arnie's awesome!  Arnie made loads of classics in the 80's - Terminator, Commando (my favourite), Total Recall, The Running Man, Predator.  The man has star quality!

It's just a shame he didn't team up with Paul 'mad as a goose on stilts' Verhoeven again to do Crusades in 1994, if you've read the script for that thing, it would have been just outrageous, not to mention a massive hit as well (probably on the sheer controversy it would have generated alone), but Carolco thought $120m was too much and decided to spend way more than that on Cutthroat Island  and Showgirls , say no more really... 

[Art]

How Total Recall 2 almost got made:
http://io9.com/5887350/we-almost-got-total-recall-2-in-the-1990s

[Goaty]

New poster with bit of crop up...

[TordelBack]

There's literally nothing about that Inception 2 poster that I like.

[Roger Godpleton]

Race Traitor.

[dweezil2]

Looks just like the Source Code poster with a bit of Inception thrown in for good measure-imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery!

[Tiplodocus]

Arnie* was one guy that could always make me buy a cinema ticket in the early to mid eighties.  He's pretty much aware that he can't act much and that we know this but often makes the most of this (e.g Terminator and Red Heat - an oft overlooked gem). Then some idiot convinced him he should do comedy.





* And Robert De Niro. Probably telling of their careers that you can hardly get me to watch them if they come on telly these days.

[Professor Bear]

Arnie started doing comedy around the time his regular script doctors took off  to make movies of their own rather than salvaging loads of rotten drafts and then never getting writing credit (or royalties).  I think they might have been the blokes who wrote the first two Predator movies, and the thought of what Commando would have been like without their input is genuinely frightening if you think about it: an indestructible German comes down from his mountain retreat to murder dozens of people, though he clearly singles out blacks, foreigners and gays?  You can sort of see why Arnie went for that script initially, and why it needed a bit of tweaking to be something other than utterly horrifying.

[JOE SOAP]

an indestructible German comes down from his mountain retreat to murder dozens of people, though he clearly singles out blacks, foreigners and gays?

A missed oppurtunity.

[Goaty]

Now the motion poster?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=O2N4qTHJUI8

[Professor Bear]

A missed oppurtunity.

I do apologise.



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