In the DVD commentary, Schwarzeneggar started laughing when Michael Ironside opens fire in the bar. He said, "How bad is this guy? He shoots a woman. He shoots an *unarmed* woman. He shoots an unarmed woman *in the back* . He shoots an unarmed woman *with three breasts* in the back."
Arnold Schwarzenegger is great in Directors commentaries, he has nothing to add so just describes and talks about what's currently on the screen "Oh I love this part"
If you're a visual artist and enjoy drawing portraits, these re:View videos are great for studying heads. They use multiple light sources and shoot at a bunch of different angles. Also, these two have the perfect hairlines to show how light reacts to the key structures at the top of the skull/hair shape.
Movies like this are why Arnold will always be the greatest action star. He did a lot of movies with cool, creative concepts and talented people. People try to say The Rock is today's Arnold, but I disagree. There will never be another Arnold
I like the Rock but I agree. I cant think of a single film The Rock has done that comes close to one of Arnold's classics, but then The Rock has never worked with a director of the calibre of Cameron, Verhoven, Milius or McTiernan.
I think a large portion of the Rock's appeal is this sense of self-awareness he brings to his roles, this ironic tint that always makes his characters slightly sarcastic. Hard contrast to the stark sincerity of Schwarzenegger, who always leans heavily on his own persona. Both have a certain appeal, I think.
Verhoeven says in the commentary that he wanted to make sure that either interpretation of reality could be correct. He wanted the viewers to be able to decide, maybe change their mind later, and then back again- but always be simultaneously right and wrong. He wanted the audience to have the same conflict of questioning reality as the character Quaid- which is genius.
It's honestly great. I can think of just as many reasons for and against each interpretation and the more you think about it the more ambiguous it gets. So well made.
@@morfx9911 Except that's exactly what happens in the movie, ya drangus. So, yeah, that's probably his interpretation. Much in the same way that my interpretation of Goodfellas is that it starts out in a car on the highway.
Now they just remake them as pg13 watered down bastardizedations with no depth and now the toys are “collectible figures” aiming at the grown ups bringing their kids to see the “new” movie
I think they got the self-driving car prediction absolutely right. Your self-driving car talks shit to you and then crashes and explodes in a fireball. 100% accurate.
I love the fact that Rich Evens can knowledgably speak at length about the intricacies of gravitational forces and inertia as portrayed in a giant planetary carnival ride, but in the same conversation can't pronounce the name Beckinsale.
Arnold's commentary track is absolute gold. The casual viewer debates whether Quaid was dreaming or not, the expert viewer questions whether Arnold thought the events in the movie actually happened to him.
When I was in college I took a Philosophy course as an elective. One class we come in and the teacher plays Total Recall for us, next class he talks about all the philosophical questions about reality and identity that the movie deals with. Then, he splits the class into groups and has us do a project where we debate whether or not Quaid should be held responsible for any crimes Hauser had committed prior to the memory wipe since they are, technically/physically, the same person (assuming everything in the movie is real and he is not lobotomized). The teacher assigned us which side of the debate we were on and required us to use clips from the movies as evidence to support our arguments. That was the best class ever, and the only part of college I enjoyed =\
These philosophical ideas are what make Kuato such an interesting character. Because he was such a powerful psychic that he must have discovered Hauser was buried in there and that Douglas Quaid was a fabrication. But he was compassionate and understanding enough to recognize that Douglas Quaid was a life of his own and an entirely new person, not to be held accountable for Hausers plan. I always liked to consider that Kuato was intelligent enough to find that insight and thats why he never harmed Quaid.
Yeah. Philosophy (and history) classes have the potential to be (and often are) a lot of fun, even without movie screenings. That's what got me to switch from pre-med to Phi. Maybe a mistake, but it's part of me now. College was one long bong rip punctuated by earnest grappling with Plato, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Marx. I would be hanging out with friends at 3am on a Friday night and just ask them what they thought of what I was reading at the time and it made those experiences, the entire experience of being alive from ages 17 to 22 all the more fun and intimate in a way. And now I'm underemployed and married with a kid on the horizon soon. It didn't make my life any easier (no way was I going into academia after a few serious talks with my favorite professor that warned me away from it) and I have few answers to "the big questions." But I wouldn't trade it for anything. Undergrad literally made me who I am today. I think all majors should have more philosophy course requisites and less bullshit electives you HAVE to pay for just for an easy 2-3 credits.
You can really tell Mike and RIch are life long friends. Mike looks so INCREDIBLY happy that Rich said Dennis Quaid, lol because he knows he can now bring it up for years to come hahaha
Any explanation on how safe flying is doesn’t change the fact that you’re hurtling through the air in a pressurised metal tube and the only thing between you and colliding with the ground is a couple of pilots and flight systems designed by the lowest bidder.
@@dan_loeb Well there WAS something in the news involving a plane incident 20-something years ago...something that Rich references and jokes about a lot...
Something just struck me. If not for Rich's granny, if she didn't indulge in Mike's and His love for movies, and filming goofy stuff, RLM would never exist. Damn, she is the real MVP
I think its the opposite on Verhoven, its not that he dismisses human life, on the contrary, every single action scene, every time a person dies in his movies, its significant, its full of gore and detail, and composition, its like there are no extras in his works, there are people, and the horrible violence that is happening around the story is not happening to faceless extras that can just fall over and disappear, its happening to people (characters), and that is why every single time they die its a spectacle because he was a person, not a prop.
I'd go so far as to say most blockbusters nowadays, like the 2012 Total Recall, have less regard for human life for depicting death as so insignificant. It's like how David Lynch talks about death as being something awful and painful instead of just bang-close eyes-dead, and so he depicts it in this really weird and horrible way (Twin Peaks S3 gore effects are SO off-putting).
Agreed, most people think he must be a psychopath but in reality he hates violence. He grew up during WWII and saw a lot of death and destruction so whenever he uses violence in movies he wants to show how horrible it can be like you stated.
100% on point. Mike talking about how that violence made him sick as a kid - it should! Verhoeven goes over the top to make you feel it. The trivialised bloodless violence of the PG action movie is far more harmful ultimately. The scene on the escalator, in any other movie we would never even have noticed that extra who got shot and just fell down. We remember that man because we felt the hits, and because in the end we are all that guy, just bumbling along until we get turned to a bloody mess while trying to mind our own business. I am meat-shield guy, and so are you.
Arnold in the woman suit is one of the craziest, funniest, ingeniously delivered moments in movie history. The whole film is a trip but that is the acid cherry on top.
That was the first scene I saw on television during some people talking about it and I immediately wanted to know what movie that was. I was 6 years old at the time. It took me about 4 years before my dad finally recorded it to VHS when it streamed on tv some night. Oh man, what a joy to behold this movie was. The entire atmosphere of it, it had such amazing set locations, especially in the beginning of the movie where things still happen on earth. Some architecture seem to spawn from dreams. Most memorable scene is still the woman in the suit. That head that opens up really blew my mind
@@JurgenCutters I saw she had a cameo in the remake which didn't happen. I switched the Colin Farrel version on for a couple minutes, saw her deliver "2 weeks" and thought to myself, "Thats nice!". I then switched over.
I will say Arnold seemed to know the business pretty well, when he requests changes they usually turn out to be the right ones. Getting more creative kills was absolutely the right call.
For anyone still wondering and reading this: The short story only covers maybe the first half hour of the film, after which it ends in fairly regular Dick fashion, with absurd doom being spelled for the human race. This makes Total Recall a very odd beast indeed, given that it is a film that pursues some very Dickian themes (questioning reality) in a very Dickian way (hanging out on Mars with hokey mutants). But most of the film is very much its own thing, building on the story initiated, but never finished, by Dick. And knowing Dick, it's very much something he might have done if he hadn't run out of speed for that month and called it good.
Total Recall was a great example of a movie that has nudity for exactly 3 seconds , and you bet your ass that 3 second window is the exact moment when mom walked in and got mad.
According to the DVD, this is the first Hollywood movie notable for having two female actresses (Sharon Stone & Rachel Ticotin) putting in hours and hours of daily training in stunt fighting over several weeks. Until then, fight scenes in movies between women were basically catfights of slapping and hairpulling.
@@chillhour6155true, i mean especially considering the In The Line of Duty franchise with Michelle Yeoh. Western b-movies had action female stars doing karate/kung-fu stuff like Cynthia Rothrock teaming up with Michelle in Yes, Madam
One of my all-time favorite movie lines is when Arnold's construction worker friend, Harry, turns out to be one of Cohaagen's men and when they nab Arnold he's like "Why?" and Harry responds by saying, "You blabbed, Quaid! You blabbed about Mars!". It's such a generic line, and yet it's so perfect.
He's the same guy who ad-libbed the Recall advertising jingle and it didn't match the ad. When I hear him sing "Recall, Recall, Recall" I mentally follow up with "I made you out of clay".
By the way, the original ending of the Philip K. Dick short story is so batshit insane you wouldn't believe it. One of the memories of the main character is saving an alien when he was a child, which in turn made the aliens promise to not conquer the earth as long as he lives and give him secret-agent superpowers. It's obviously dismissed as a false implanted memory until the ending confirms that it's fucking true and after he dies aliens are going to conquer the earth.
Philip K Dick is the greatest insane author of all time. Next to William S Burroghs and Hunter S Thompson. Too bad you can only write that awesome if you're on an insane amount of drugs.
When I was 10 years old, my dad was supposed to take me to a piano lesson. Instead, we went and saw this movie. It was absolutely amazing. Not sure if my mom ever found out.
Rich is not the only one, though. I recently listened to the No Such Thing As a Bad Movie podcast and Colin (from Canada) calls her 'Beckinsdale' too in the Van Helsing episode.
At school one of my science teachers spent years writing to Arnold Schwarzenegger asking for permission to use the scene where he's suffocating on the surface of Mars on the 'physics intranet' as an illustration of pressure. Eventually got permission and he was so happy to be able to use it. I hope that intranet site is saved somewhere and hasn't just been deleted, it was a true work of art.
Imagine having vacation memories implanted in your head like this and coming back to your ordinary life and being around your wife and your co-workers, all of whom you have incredibly vivid memories of brutally murdering. Real relaxing vacation. Really sets you up to go back to your working life refreshed.
Total Recall was the single greatest movie theater experience of my life. In my small town, movies were never that busy, or at least I never went to a big opening night. For this one the lines were around the block at our downtown theater. It was an old stage theater converted for movies and it had a balcony that had never been used in my lifetime and they opened it for this and it was packed. The crowd was so loud with their cheering that sometimes you couldn't hear the dialogue, which is sometimes annoying, but this time I was into it. When the lady changed the colors of her fingernails there were oohs and aahs from the audience. The escalator guy becoming a human shield caused gasps. And of course when Quaid suggests brunette for his choice of female the girls in the crowed hissed. I remember during the big action people were stomping their feet and you could feel the theater shake. Again, I wouldn't like it for every movie but it was a very memorable experience.
@@chrisd653 I was about 15 and I hadn't seen a response quite that big before. When the Star Wars special editions came out in '97 and Episode I in '99 those were also huge.
I remember once reading that Verhoeven does his violence so grotesque because he believes it to be silly how numb we have grown to it, that is why he pushed the boundaries with all of his action (and to an extension, the stories he tolds) being so cynical, senseless and gratuitus, sometimes in a way that is very disturbing for the audiences of a mainstream movie.
Which I consider more than a little ironic, because- I mean, you can't hold him responsible for the desensitization of north american audiences, obviously. But for me personally? Oh yeah. Oh hell yeah. When I first saw Robocop I was 9 and I had difficulty staying in the room when Kenny bought it, it was just too much. Now Robocop is one of my favourite movies all time, and the insanely graphic violence is a big reason why. Today I'm a horribly cynical middle-aged man who can actually cope with the world a little bit, partially because of the violent movies I watched as a child. Thanks for the desensitization, Paul!
@@brew1116 - Kind of the same for me, as I grew desensitized to movie gore by playing Mortal Kombat game as a kid. Yet still, that's more on us for watching things that weren't deemed for us.
There's something so heartwarming about when Mike really just comes out and says he loves a film because he's usually so sarcastic and even stuff he likes he sort of half-assedly talks it up, I love that he just said 'one of the greatest fucking movies ever made'..
I love this running gag of editing Rich so that any time he misspeaks, it’s made to appear even worse. I have to believe he didn’t actually say “Beckinsdale” again after 26:40 and it’s just Jay reusing the audio from a few seconds earlier 😂
You're absolutely correct. I listened back a few times, the 2nd time he says it you can hear a slight cut before "Kate" and the volume is slightly louder than the audio before and after the edit.
The short story is a little weird, but basically the main character goes to recall to get some fun memories of being a secret agent on mars, only to find out that he was basically a war criminal who was putting down the political leaders of mars, but had the memories suppressed for his and the earth government's protection. Eventually the government convinces him to suppress the memories again, but to give him fun action memories of a different thing that didn't happen. So he goes to a shrink to find a better fictional memory to use, and comes up with one where he was a child and befriended aliens who liked him so much they agreed to not blow up the earth. Only to find out that actually happened to, and he had the memories suppressed.
So the canon answer is that the main character is actually subconsciously picking to receive memories that were suppressed when he goes to get them implanted. Also it's interesting how they managed to merge the two stories together so well in the movie.
@@LanceThumping Or that the way they make you feel as though those things really happened to you is by making you believe the fake memories were just suppressed memories.
@@LanceThumping Sorta? Philip K. Dick was great at writing looping plots that make you able to parse out but also wonder how reliable the narration is. My fave of his is ubik and he is just one of those writers that kitchen sink their stories.
In the novelization, in a scene when they are running (I think it's just after Quaid shoots Lori in the face) and Richter is chasing them, Quaid asks Melina: "What did you do before all this?", and Melina gives the prompt answer: "I was modeling for Recall. Why?"
Oh, that's clever. Now we don't know whether Quaid dreamed of Melina because he had actual memories of her, or only implanted memories from a previous visit to Recall.
My grandfather Robert Quincy Riley designed and built the Johnny Cab car, and then was paid to let them use it in the movie. He passed recently sadly, I love seeing the car in the movie and other people enjoy it.
That's cool your grandfather was very talented. I think eventually when self driving cars are ubiquitous the government/corporations will put characters like Johnny Cab in.
I almost shit myself in disbelief when Mike said he thought it was fuckin terrible after watching it as an adult. This is my absolute favourite of both Verhoeven and Arnolds movies. And this is such a Mike movie.
Honestly, Ive come to greatly appreciate Rich as the one who often brings the most inciteful and enlightening anal-sis and breakdowns of movies. He's a pretty sharp guy!
@@sweatyhaggis4303 Stopped drinking and got engaged! Good shit. I stopped drinking... but I'm not sure viable wife material still exists in this country, I've looked. I'm no pony ride myself but holy shit.
I saw Total Recall on opening weekend. I think I was 8. Saturday morning my parents come downstairs and say we're going to see it... my dad wanted to see the three-breasted woman. The theater was packed. The movie blew my mind and changed how I saw pregnancy forever.
fucking top quality dad. Mine was definitely not that cool when I was 8 but by the time I was 16 he was renting Heavy Metal for us, so it all evened out.
Mike's reaction to the "Dennis Quaid" thing is one of the best RLM moments of all time. I can see his entire thought process play out entirely in his facial expressions: at first he's genuinely confused, trying to figure out what Dennis Quaid has to do with anything and what the hell Rich is talking about. Then he instantly understands what happened in Rich's brain and laughs because it should've been obvious immediately, and then the laughter becomes more and more uncontrollable, and meanwhile Rich just continues to talk unaware of what Mike is going through until he finally notices the laughter.
Mike explaining the correct pronunciation of Kate Beckinsale and then Rich saying it wrong anyway is a classic as well. I’m wondering if there wasn’t some slight of hand with the edit.
Wtf? Do androids dream of electric sheep? is like the best book title of all time. Sums up the entire premise of the story without giving too much away and is super unique.
@@bombdatacenters Deckard aspired to own an electric sheep. To the point he dreamed about them. The title plays into the philosophical question of his world pertaining to the ability of artificial intelligence to have wants or aspirations like humans.
Here's a weird idea. We see scenes with Cohagen and the other bad guys WITHOUT Arnold, which is significant. We see them talk and interact with each other, despite the fact that Arnold isn't there to see it. You would think a computer simulation would run the computer people in the background when they are "off screen", as bits of data. Or freeze them until it's their turn to show up again. Something along those lines. A simulator would only show the the simulated elements to actual flesh and blood participants, who are the only ones that have the cognition to perceive the simulation. If the movie takes place as a dream, why does the simulator create these unseen acts? I know I'm overthinking it, but that is my argument for the movie being in reality, and Arnold IS a spy. I don't REALLY believe all this, it's just fun to ponder.
That's a great point - but if it IS all in Arnold's head / a simulation, couldn't that could still be possible? Like how in a dream you sometimes have 3rd person omniscience.
@@luckyduckydrivingschool3615 If Arnold did witness them in that way, he would have been tipped off to their plans, at least enough to make his next move with some clairvoyance. You'd think he'd at least mention it to someone he trusts. Unlike a normal dream, Arnold is witnessing it as if real, thanks to either being hooked up to their special brain poking machine, or that it really is happening. He'd experience them as if they he suddenly shifted to a new consciousness for a time. Even if he only "dreamed" these visions while asleep in the simulation, it still doesn't make sense that the computer would go to all that trouble for no real value. Especially because we can see the visions don't leave an impression on Arnold, why would the computer persist with them anyway?
I think that's a fantastic argument. The movie is obviously conceived of as being open to interpretation, and I think that it's very much by design that you actually CAN interpret the movie at face value, this being a point to argue that position.
Elder scrolls 4 had npcs live regular lives, including sleeping and eating. Somebody once discovered if you take the food from the prison guards, they will kill and rob the prisoners in order to maintain their programming.
Mike Remembers being grossed out by man being used as human shield, Rich remembers loving it, I remember almost having a panic attack when Arnold removes a ping-pong ball through his nostril.
You can find this out a lot earlier. Mike refers to her as "Nanu" several times, usually referencing the filming of Gorilla Interrupted and trashing her old house.
Monkey Man Gets His, which that old VHS footage is from, is floating around in the ether. I wouldn't recommend it. (Other earlier work like The Grabowskis and their pyrite centered musical is worth digging up though.)
Andrew Freund is most known for his pull quote on the DVD release of Total Recall (2012) where he claims that the re-make of Total Recall is better than the original. Mr. Freund was presumably financially compensated for this MySpace quote.
Videos with Mike and Rich honestly give me that warm feeling of catching up with my best friend. Where we just end up talking about films, games and the same old quotes that still make us laugh after years apart. "It's staying in!" **Rich does the "fuck! ... I know" look**
Fun fact: There is a scene where Johnny Cab says to arnold Schwarzenegger "Hell of a day, isn´t it?". In the German version he burps very loud and long. I am not kidding. I checked all audio tracks on my blu ray (Englisch, Spanisch, French, etc.) and the German version is the only one where he burps. I don´t kow why they did that and I can´t find any other information whatsoever about the German burping Johnny Cab.
Seeing the original Total Recall cut next to the modern one is probably the most concise criticism on modern cinema I've ever experienced without words
The blurring in and out on the face of the love interest at the Recall facility could be (and was probably intended to be) interpreted as him hallucinating her actual face as the image of the woman from his dream.
As someone who grew up in Mexico City, 1990 Total Recall will always have a special place in my heart because not only is it a great movie, but a lot of it was filmed in locations around Mexico City, including a subway station for the subway scenes, and I always thought of all the work they must have done to disguise it just for a few scenes.
After all the people saying it scarred them as a kid I'm now worried I'm a sociopath because these movies I was watching at like 5 or 6 had no effect on me other than I enjoyed it.
I absolutely love the shot at 14:12 where Arnie has just killed 4 people. It is incredibly beautifully with perfect composition. One of the best in all of cinema IMO.
I kept waiting for them to say that the Recall red-pill doctor guy is the same guy that plays the finger waggling game against Data in TNG, but they never did!
Is anyone else deeply disappointed in Mike for not mentioning that the Rekall guy that offered him the pill was Sirna Kolrami in the season 2 TNG episode "Peak Performance"?
Did he mention that the 3 boobed woman played Ensign Sonia Gomez in 2 episodes? She spills coffee on Picard. I was kind of doing other things while this was playing so I don't know if he did.
Such a simple, but evocative movie. That line where a mutant asks Arnold if he "wants to know the future" to which he replies "how about the past" is a great example of a quick, throwaway, funny line of dialogue that is actually pretty revealing about the character. This was like a "holy shit" moment making me realize that characters with amnesia and characters who find out something about the future in films are often practically the same character with the same goals and arcs.
I've bought this film on every format and I watched the 4k last week and was still blown away. I hate that they don't make films like this anymore, or ever will again.
@@Lultschful i mean nobody made them as nihilistic as verhoven but there are plenty of badass action movies from the 80’s-90’s, tango and cash for one. jackie chan’s HK stuff from the time, and more recently i feel craig zahler’s films have a similar feeling in terms of visceral gore effects, but not in digestibility as they’re significantly darker.
Man i think its something to be said for the fact that the original still rattles around rent free in my head and i regularly forget theres a new one a decade later
I have lived in México City my whole life, and when I watched this movie as a kid I loved that many of the earth scenes where filmed in the chabacano metro station and many other plazas. In my daily commutes to highschool and college I always thought "I'm living in total recall baby" specially since the metro hasn't visually changed since the early 80s.
What amazed me as a kid, was the complete lack of health and safety in the movie. Arnie working construction 5 days a week with ZERO ear protection. X-Ray machines making you sterile as you walked through them EVERY DAY to work. Giant fucking mars domes with COUNTLESS glass panels just WAITING to get shattered by some kid with a catapult and a rock. Everyone in this movie deserved to die from just work related injuries.
The silent point of the movie is that Martian colonization is basically a capitalist theme park, where everything has a price, and workers themselves are commodities. There is no government, so therefore no health and safety regulations. On Earth during this time, it is similar - with full deregulation of industries and private ownership of all vital human resources. This is why the corporations on Mars do everything possible to stop Quaid from starting the reactor and giving everyone free air - because they're making billions charging people for it, and it keeps the workers accepting shitty work conditions and pay to create profit for them.
What kid is thinking about those kinds of things? All I thought about were the three tittied lady and the horrifying face prosthetics, as a kid AND an adult.
I was about 10 when my parents took me and my little brother to see this in theatre. The part where Arny rips off Ironsides arms on the elevator, is still burnt into my brain!
It could only have been a dream if Arnold witnessed all events. But there are scenes that happened outside of Arnold’s perception, therefore I think it was not a dream.
I agree. The French (same director as the Professional and Fifth Element) had another opportunity to make a good, non-serious sci-fi action film when that other film came out much later. It was so bad I don't even remember the title or who starred in it, I just remember the two lead actors were models first and always looked vaguely miserable on screen.
@@12ealDealOfficial The director is Luc Besson and you're thinking of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. It was pretty awful, though the first 5 minutes were kinds cool.
Verhoeven has said often that he believes his fascination with gratuitous, graphic violence was borne out of his experiences as a young child during World War II. Seeing dead bodies, mutilated in the streets by bullets and bombs, scarred his psyche and using graphic violence is an outlet for him.
Specifically the odd mixture of finding it horrifying and exciting at the same time. IIRC he mentions waking up to find that an Allied bombing raid had accidentally blown up his neighbour's house
Verhoeven always struck me as fairly misanthropic. Most of his films center on people being ruthlessly terrible to each other. No doubt a lot of that came from his wartime experiences.
18:55 Mike, water ice isn't the only form of ice. The ice caps on Mars are carbon dioxide ice, for example. Also, somewhat true to the movie, there is Martian O2 that's locked in the rocks irl. In principle, if the rock were molten, it could release the oxygen as a gas. Terraforming wouldn't happen overnight but it's not nothing.
The way I remember it, I thought the Martian machine was decomposing the water into Oxygen and Hydrogen, not melting it, but that does leave the problem of having an Oxygen and Hydrogen atmosphere...
@@p0rq Meh, not really. They originally attempted to adapt Minority Report into a sequel to TR. They failed... miserably.... then put everything down, walked away, and went back to drinking. Years later MR was adapted.
why does he have to die at the end? I think he fulfilled the total recall mission as they created for him. He might have just woke up on the chair and then went home
I for one, find Paul Verhoevens use of violence in all his films utterly hilarious. Robocop was one of the funniest things I had ever seen because to me it was so obvious that it was intended to be over the top. When I recently watched Total Recall, I was laughing out LOUD at the "meat shield" scene. I also loved the fact that Arnold and Ironside violently shoved/tackled every person in their way during the chases. The body language is obvious that they were directed to push pedestrians out of the way as violently as possible. There is a guy walking up a staircase later in the movie that Arnold literally shoves so hard he flips off the stairs and falls. Comedy genius. I definitely believe there is an intentional humor to Verhoevens style that was never understood by like 97% of audiences.
Every single time I've seen this film, I always laugh out loud at one moment where Arnold shoves some pedestrian HARD, and he makes a loud 'UGH' sound. It's so random and a throwaway, I don't know why, but it just always gets me. So ridiculous but so good at the same time
Schwarzenegger was in a decent amount of legit 10/10 movies. Even though this was made in the 80s I think it holds up and has aged well thanks to the set designs of futuristic architecture, and the way they chose to display the philosophy and societal themes. No other movie looks or feels like this one.
They used to actually have actions stars in high concept action movies. Now action movies are just spy thrillers or giant robot movies. I'd they do make a high concept action movie it's never with a big actions star like the rock and its never made by a big time director. It will star an over the hill actor trying to reinvent himself as an action guy and will be made by a no name hack director with a tiny budget and written by an AI script writer.
Total Recall has this oddly warm, nostalgic feeling to me. I remember seeing it on a hotel TV as a seven year old and being freaked out by the scene where they running out of oxygen.
This is why practical effects are so effective. They still have a sense of realism. Whereas when it’s CGI, your brain just doesn’t fall for it and it feels like you’re watching a cartoon. That sense of danger or suspension of disbelief just isn’t as strong.
I've been having this same debate off and on again with my friends for years. It is absolutely delightful that this movie endures so well. It is in my top 10 for life.
Effects work in this is all around damn near flawless. One of the last huge projects prosthetic makeup effects GENIUS Rob Bottin spearheaded & that's a damn shame. Plus I think the mixture of miniature & optical effects used to portray the exteriors of Mars in those big long tracking shots, or later when the camera's swirling around the mine to get a better look at all the giant unheated rods is staggeringly inventive. Kinda like the aesthetics of it more than I do seeing so many films now just shrugging it all away with CGI.
I think it’s all about the artistry & how well the production team/director can integrate everything. Sometimes a big matte painting can constrain a scene, but if you work within the constraints & have a great matte painter you can have something that is far more effective than a CGI background that is more versatile, but is just not well thought-out
It's a good call... CG gets overused now, it's got to be super-detailed, have so much going on (thinking of the remake or Transformers). If they just used it to make things like that train shot, but just more realistic, it would be sufficient.. but no, it has to pan in all sorts of wonderful ways and lens flare all over the place (who'd want to work on a bridge like that, Star Trek reboot!). I think that's why the Dune remake is good, a lot of their CG is slower and just enables certain things to be in screen, but even that still has lost a lot of character.
@@fokeyjo absolutely, in the right hands, CGI can be quite effectively employed, Dune ABSOLUTELY being the most current & shining example. I think mainly due to the director being such a precise & detail oriented visual stylist who pre-planned in extraordinary detail way before ever day 1 on the set exactly how CGI would be employed to enhance & expand his overall vision. For similar reasons Matt Reeves' two Planet of the Apes prequels register as SO stunning for his skill at integrating on set photography utilizing actors as the apes & WETA's digital effects translations, no doubt enhanced by Andy Serkis' suggestions. Too often this isn't the case & the difference between reality & CG is jarring.
Watched this in cinema couple of weeks ago with my dad..70....and nephew...21 who had never seen it blew them away and me again ....I just turned 50 👍👍👍👍👍
As for Total Recall ditching the "Is it real?"-angle after the red pill scene, it makes perfect sense. Either Quaid is really a secret agent, then Cohaagen and Richter tried that angle and know it won't work because Quaid already comitted to being sure it's all real. And if Quaid really is dying at Recall, then he comitted to the fantasy by refusing the red pill and killing the doctor. Either way: The character is comitted to live through this story and this is reflected in the lack of ambiguous scenes.
I always interpreted it as being a fake memory, but that the red pill stuff was part of the fantasy. They had to have simulated that drop of sweat, after all.
@MadnerKami - I agree. I was thinking the same thing when they brought up that point. Either way, the character has committed to that path and the ambiguity no longer matters. It's an interesting twist on the "is it all a dream?" trope to let it "resolve" partway through the movie instead of using it to make an ambiguous ending.
If it were a novel it would be easier to weave doubt throughout the narrative, as Dick famously does in Ubik. But a film has a lot less opportunities to do this kind of thing. I thought the film handled it pretty well.
Isn't it punctuated with the entire wall blasting away and tons of bad guys running to grab him right after that? Like.. There was a moment of pause, but the second he committed to it they literally exploded back into full gear.
@@ArchHippy What the doctor says though is that Quaid is in a "free form delusion that he's inventing himself as he goes along" - so, the bead of sweat is just another part of that delusion. The doctor doesn't fit into what is now cemented into Quaid's head as real, so he's more likely to see him as being co-opted by Cohagen than being at Rekall. Because he strongly suspects this, the bead of sweat appears, meaning essentially, that the image of the doctor is being corrupted by Quaid's mind as it works to make him fit the delusion.
I dig how Rich pronounces the name Beckonsdale, asks for the correct pronunciation from Mike, who enunciates out Beck en sale , and then Rich immediately says Beckonsdale again.
I'll never forget the first time I watched this movie. I was 16, high and drunk and had just jumped back in through my window after sneaking out. This movie came on and the music immediately told me this would be something special.....I passed out at the "Open your mind part".
There's lots of fun stuff in this that they rightly touch on, but my fave might be Dan O'Bannon being pissed at them changing his original ending. The original motive was supposed to be that the alien reactor only had a Quaid shaped handprint instead of just a generic alien one, and that he was actually a synth copy created by the reactor/aliens itself. There's a quote floating around online about it where it was supposed to be another layer on the "is it real/fake" thing, about how wiping his memories and sending him to earth is the only way Cohagen can control him and stop him becoming a new God, and that when he touches it all the actual memories of the aliens/his real origin come back to him (a lot of that ended up in the novelisation). O'Bannon said it was a way of explaining how he survives all the madness/is able to kill everyone in an in-universe way IE: because he isn't human but equally it might all be a fantasy. Pretty neat IMO.
So they messed with the same type of question in both total recall and blade runner. I don’t understand, did they just think audiences wanted a concrete answer and ending?
@@natelax1367 not sure. I know in BR they changed it because they thought it became too dark and they wanted at least one human connection to the film (which makes Scott's walking back on the thing even more dumb years later). I think they just didn't want to tip their hand too much like the guys say. You'd have to include a bunch of alien stuff right at the end.
Here's the quote: That wasn't supposed to be a three-fingered Martian hand print [on the machine]. That was supposed to have been a print of [Quaid's] hand which matched only his hand. Quaid, Earth's top secret agent, went to Mars and entered this compound. The machine killed him and created a synthetic duplicate. He is that synthetic duplicate. He cannot be killed because he can anticipate danger before it happens. He is also omnipotent and because he cannot be killed, Earth wants to kill him but cannot. That's why they go to all the trouble to erase his brain to make him think he's nobody. It's the only way they can control him. Audiences don't question it when movie heroes go through adventures and don't get killed. I thought it was clever to actually have a reason for it. At the end of the picture, Quaid puts his hand on the device and it all comes back to him, who he really is. His total recall of his identity is that he is a creation of a Martian machine. He is, in effect, a resurrection of the Martian race in a synthetic body. He turns and says to all the other characters, "It's gonna be fun to play God".
"It's in his head" is the boring interpretation. Whenever a movie gives you two options, always pick the cooler one. It's like in Slaughterhouse Five, you COULD interpret it that he's in a coma, but where's the fun in that? Much more fun to imagine he's time traveling and going to outerspace and reliving his death 500 times
![NONT TANONT - ดอกไม้ที่รอฝน (spring) - Reimagined [Live Session]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/nY2PsFZFEOg/mqdefault.jpg)
For a science fiction movie, the part where Arnold chose a Hispanic woman over his wife was surprisingly realistic.
Great comment! If only Melina was a maid!
YOOOOOOOOOOOO
@@eugener9706 maybe she dressed up for him, we don't know...
Well done, sir.
😂
Rich is that friend who you initially thought was weird but then discovered was the coolest person ever.
He reminds me of an old friend I had and I love him
This is the best thing I have ever read. You are so correct.
God bless him, this man is a national treasure
I love him. I want to have children with him. I'm a male but iPhone emojis say that I can do that now
I think I speak for us all when I say that I’m gay for Rich Evans
In the DVD commentary, Schwarzeneggar started laughing when Michael Ironside opens fire in the bar. He said, "How bad is this guy? He shoots a woman. He shoots an *unarmed* woman. He shoots an unarmed woman *in the back* . He shoots an unarmed woman *with three breasts* in the back."
Arnold Schwarzenegger is great in Directors commentaries, he has nothing to add so just describes and talks about what's currently on the screen "Oh I love this part"
To the point that he says "Ouch! That hurt..." when Quaid gets kicked in the nuts.
He also talked about how he loved being in bed with Sharon Stone.🤣
@@hiigara4159 based
I love that commentary track. Although it was Veerhoven who added the 3 breasts part.
If you're a visual artist and enjoy drawing portraits, these re:View videos are great for studying heads. They use multiple light sources and shoot at a bunch of different angles. Also, these two have the perfect hairlines to show how light reacts to the key structures at the top of the skull/hair shape.
The lighting in all their productions is impeccable
Is this an ellaborate way of calling them balding fucks? Because that would be neat.
Luv random, helpful and generous comments like this 💞
Brilliant back handed compliment
Thanks, I'll tell my artist mate, this is hilarious
Movies like this are why Arnold will always be the greatest action star. He did a lot of movies with cool, creative concepts and talented people. People try to say The Rock is today's Arnold, but I disagree. There will never be another Arnold
That is why in my book Vin Diesel has the better track record than The Rock. Diesel at least has the Riddick trilogy.
I like the Rock but I agree. I cant think of a single film The Rock has done that comes close to one of Arnold's classics, but then The Rock has never worked with a director of the calibre of Cameron, Verhoven, Milius or McTiernan.
I think a large portion of the Rock's appeal is this sense of self-awareness he brings to his roles, this ironic tint that always makes his characters slightly sarcastic. Hard contrast to the stark sincerity of Schwarzenegger, who always leans heavily on his own persona. Both have a certain appeal, I think.
@@ianucci Have you seen The Rundown? It is very 80's action movie esque and has Christopher Walken as the "villain". Its one of my favs.
The Rock is very one-note, but im curious to see how he is in Black Adam
Verhoeven says in the commentary that he wanted to make sure that either interpretation of reality could be correct. He wanted the viewers to be able to decide, maybe change their mind later, and then back again- but always be simultaneously right and wrong. He wanted the audience to have the same conflict of questioning reality as the character Quaid- which is genius.
Quaid doesn't actually seem to question it that much. He makes his decision once he sees that guy sweat.
@@clownpendotfart thats your interpretation (?
It's honestly great. I can think of just as many reasons for and against each interpretation and the more you think about it the more ambiguous it gets. So well made.
Yes! This is what I recall from a recent listen to the commentary, and it works. Im always flipping back and forth.
@@morfx9911 Except that's exactly what happens in the movie, ya drangus.
So, yeah, that's probably his interpretation. Much in the same way that my interpretation of Goodfellas is that it starts out in a car on the highway.
the 80's were a magical time where hard R films were seen more by kids than adults to the point they had toy lines aimed at actual kids for many.
It's honestly amazing it took so long for PG-13 to become a thing.
Now they just remake them as pg13 watered down bastardizedations with no depth and now the toys are “collectible figures” aiming at the grown ups bringing their kids to see the “new” movie
@@LittleMissLounge I may be wrong but I thought Indiana Jones and the temple of Doom was the movie that caused the pg-13 rating
And it didn't ruin our minds as much as the sugary moralistic sitcoms did.
Yea I had seen and had the toys for robocop,terminator,aliens and predator before I was 5.such a time to be a kid
I think they got the self-driving car prediction absolutely right. Your self-driving car talks shit to you and then crashes and explodes in a fireball. 100% accurate.
Also, it's able to carry on a conversation as if it's intelligent, but it clearly knows nothing about the real world. It predicted ChatGPT.
THANKS ELON.
Listening to Rich say hollywood actor names wrong one after another always puts a smile on my face.
He murtled the names you could say
He's so_fucking_ambivalous about them!
Who, Mitch Evans?
And knowing that he probably corrected himself but then Mike edited it out makes me smile even more
26:38
Rich is corrected on how to say Beckinsale, IMMEDIATELY gets it wrong again.
I love the fact that Rich Evens can knowledgably speak at length about the intricacies of gravitational forces and inertia as portrayed in a giant planetary carnival ride, but in the same conversation can't pronounce the name Beckinsale.
Murtle.
You mean the Vomit Comet? It's an airplane.
No god is perfect.
Maybe he has dyslexia or something.
@@StreetPreacherr no, you'd feel it in your body still.
Arnold's commentary track is absolute gold. The casual viewer debates whether Quaid was dreaming or not, the expert viewer questions whether Arnold thought the events in the movie actually happened to him.
Virgin Total recall viewer
vs Chad Total Recall viewer
😂
@@Edbradvirgin Total Recall theorizer vs the chad Arnold delusion enabler
When I was in college I took a Philosophy course as an elective. One class we come in and the teacher plays Total Recall for us, next class he talks about all the philosophical questions about reality and identity that the movie deals with. Then, he splits the class into groups and has us do a project where we debate whether or not Quaid should be held responsible for any crimes Hauser had committed prior to the memory wipe since they are, technically/physically, the same person (assuming everything in the movie is real and he is not lobotomized). The teacher assigned us which side of the debate we were on and required us to use clips from the movies as evidence to support our arguments.
That was the best class ever, and the only part of college I enjoyed =\
These philosophical ideas are what make Kuato such an interesting character. Because he was such a powerful psychic that he must have discovered Hauser was buried in there and that Douglas Quaid was a fabrication. But he was compassionate and understanding enough to recognize that Douglas Quaid was a life of his own and an entirely new person, not to be held accountable for Hausers plan. I always liked to consider that Kuato was intelligent enough to find that insight and thats why he never harmed Quaid.
That sounds like a good teacher right there Holy cow
Teachers like that are rare, they go the extra step to make learning interesting to make it easier to absorb
I had a similar class except our movie was "Requiem for a Dream" your project seems like more fun.
Yeah. Philosophy (and history) classes have the potential to be (and often are) a lot of fun, even without movie screenings. That's what got me to switch from pre-med to Phi. Maybe a mistake, but it's part of me now. College was one long bong rip punctuated by earnest grappling with Plato, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Marx. I would be hanging out with friends at 3am on a Friday night and just ask them what they thought of what I was reading at the time and it made those experiences, the entire experience of being alive from ages 17 to 22 all the more fun and intimate in a way. And now I'm underemployed and married with a kid on the horizon soon. It didn't make my life any easier (no way was I going into academia after a few serious talks with my favorite professor that warned me away from it) and I have few answers to "the big questions." But I wouldn't trade it for anything. Undergrad literally made me who I am today. I think all majors should have more philosophy course requisites and less bullshit electives you HAVE to pay for just for an easy 2-3 credits.
You can really tell Mike and RIch are life long friends. Mike looks so INCREDIBLY happy that Rich said Dennis Quaid, lol because he knows he can now bring it up for years to come hahaha
“I don’t think you understand how phobias work” is funnier than any Rich Evans flub, that was fantastic.
He's been in 15 Car crashes that week
Planes are safer than cars statistically.
Yeah, but when I nudge some old grannies bumper my relatives don't get dragged in to identify my teeth.
Any explanation on how safe flying is doesn’t change the fact that you’re hurtling through the air in a pressurised metal tube and the only thing between you and colliding with the ground is a couple of pilots and flight systems designed by the lowest bidder.
Rich hasn't been on a plane for 20 years ... Hmmm.. I wonder what happened last time he went on a plane.
@@dan_loeb Well there WAS something in the news involving a plane incident 20-something years ago...something that Rich references and jokes about a lot...
Paul Verhoeven is a underrated genius, he manages to glorify violence and make it horrifying at the same time.
@@KrillLiberator lol total Chad move
Who underrated him
@Neal McEneaney critics of his era would completely not get it, then on vhs they would become cultish, then slowly make top 100 lists 30 years later
Just like Showgirls glorified nudity while making it horrifying at the same time
The brain bug feeding, it's so disturbingly grotesque, but GOD I love it.
Something just struck me. If not for Rich's granny, if she didn't indulge in Mike's and His love for movies, and filming goofy stuff, RLM would never exist. Damn, she is the real MVP
Canon/Nexus Event
@@thedarthbred Mushu the my buddy doll is key to all of this
RIP Nanu. She truly fostered young talent.
I think its the opposite on Verhoven, its not that he dismisses human life, on the contrary, every single action scene, every time a person dies in his movies, its significant, its full of gore and detail, and composition, its like there are no extras in his works, there are people, and the horrible violence that is happening around the story is not happening to faceless extras that can just fall over and disappear, its happening to people (characters), and that is why every single time they die its a spectacle because he was a person, not a prop.
I'd go so far as to say most blockbusters nowadays, like the 2012 Total Recall, have less regard for human life for depicting death as so insignificant. It's like how David Lynch talks about death as being something awful and painful instead of just bang-close eyes-dead, and so he depicts it in this really weird and horrible way (Twin Peaks S3 gore effects are SO off-putting).
Verhoven does not dismiss human life. The societies he depicts in his films do, and he is drawing attention to that.
Agreed, most people think he must be a psychopath but in reality he hates violence. He grew up during WWII and saw a lot of death and destruction so whenever he uses violence in movies he wants to show how horrible it can be like you stated.
I love this take
100% on point. Mike talking about how that violence made him sick as a kid - it should! Verhoeven goes over the top to make you feel it. The trivialised bloodless violence of the PG action movie is far more harmful ultimately. The scene on the escalator, in any other movie we would never even have noticed that extra who got shot and just fell down. We remember that man because we felt the hits, and because in the end we are all that guy, just bumbling along until we get turned to a bloody mess while trying to mind our own business. I am meat-shield guy, and so are you.
Arnold in the woman suit is one of the craziest, funniest, ingeniously delivered moments in movie history. The whole film is a trip but that is the acid cherry on top.
That was the first scene I saw on television during some people talking about it and I immediately wanted to know what movie that was. I was 6 years old at the time. It took me about 4 years before my dad finally recorded it to VHS when it streamed on tv some night. Oh man, what a joy to behold this movie was. The entire atmosphere of it, it had such amazing set locations, especially in the beginning of the movie where things still happen on earth. Some architecture seem to spawn from dreams. Most memorable scene is still the woman in the suit. That head that opens up really blew my mind
@@themoviedealers haha fuck, yea that's what I meant. Good call
@@JurgenCutters I saw she had a cameo in the remake which didn't happen. I switched the Colin Farrel version on for a couple minutes, saw her deliver "2 weeks" and thought to myself, "Thats nice!". I then switched over.
two weeks...🤪
TWO WEEKS!!!
I will say Arnold seemed to know the business pretty well, when he requests changes they usually turn out to be the right ones. Getting more creative kills was absolutely the right call.
He wouldn’t have needed to ask Verhoeven twice.
For anyone still wondering and reading this: The short story only covers maybe the first half hour of the film, after which it ends in fairly regular Dick fashion, with absurd doom being spelled for the human race. This makes Total Recall a very odd beast indeed, given that it is a film that pursues some very Dickian themes (questioning reality) in a very Dickian way (hanging out on Mars with hokey mutants). But most of the film is very much its own thing, building on the story initiated, but never finished, by Dick. And knowing Dick, it's very much something he might have done if he hadn't run out of speed for that month and called it good.
Thanks for the info!
IIRC it ends with Quaid sitting on a bench with a towel round his head waiting for the police to arrive and arrest him.
I attempted to read the man in the high castle, absolute dog shyt
@@jamesjameson4566 That's very helpful information. Thank you.
@@onanthebarbarian4842 It's actually a really good book.
Mike: "he has no regards for human life"
Rich: *can barely contain his smile*
Basically those doctors would be right at home working under Dr Mengele so, you know. Grease those fuckers, I say.
IIRC, he credits this to his living through WWII. Pretty deep.
Total Recall was a great example of a movie that has nudity for exactly 3 seconds , and you bet your ass that 3 second window is the exact moment when mom walked in and got mad.
Terminator 1 is THE film for this.
How about Demolition Man?
Trading Places?
Heavy Metal
@@sharpeslass5452 Puritan roots...that's why.
According to the DVD, this is the first Hollywood movie notable for having two female actresses (Sharon Stone & Rachel Ticotin) putting in hours and hours of daily training in stunt fighting over several weeks. Until then, fight scenes in movies between women were basically catfights of slapping and hairpulling.
That wouldn’t have been so bad
We mean in western only cinema
@@chillhour6155true, i mean especially considering the In The Line of Duty franchise with Michelle Yeoh. Western b-movies had action female stars doing karate/kung-fu stuff like Cynthia Rothrock teaming up with Michelle in Yes, Madam
One of my all-time favorite movie lines is when Arnold's construction worker friend, Harry, turns out to be one of Cohaagen's men and when they nab Arnold he's like "Why?" and Harry responds by saying, "You blabbed, Quaid! You blabbed about Mars!". It's such a generic line, and yet it's so perfect.
He's the same guy who ad-libbed the Recall advertising jingle and it didn't match the ad. When I hear him sing "Recall, Recall, Recall" I mentally follow up with "I made you out of clay".
@@AdrianColley lol great, now I'm gonna think of that when I watch it.
By the way, the original ending of the Philip K. Dick short story is so batshit insane you wouldn't believe it. One of the memories of the main character is saving an alien when he was a child, which in turn made the aliens promise to not conquer the earth as long as he lives and give him secret-agent
superpowers. It's obviously dismissed as a false implanted memory until the ending confirms that it's fucking true and after he dies aliens are going to conquer the earth.
Thank you.
Whaaaaaaat
The 90s version is bizarre enough for that ending to actually work.
Kinda like "Save the Green Planet!"?
Philip K Dick is the greatest insane author of all time. Next to William S Burroghs and Hunter S Thompson.
Too bad you can only write that awesome if you're on an insane amount of drugs.
It is one of my absolute favorite things when Stoklasa pulls out pieces of paper to read from during these.
When I was 10 years old, my dad was supposed to take me to a piano lesson. Instead, we went and saw this movie. It was absolutely amazing. Not sure if my mom ever found out.
He's now in the dad hall of fame.
That edit at 26:40 to make rich say Beckinsdale twice is so subtly evil only mike could have done it.
Rich is not the only one, though. I recently listened to the No Such Thing As a Bad Movie podcast and Colin (from Canada) calls her 'Beckinsdale' too in the Van Helsing episode.
My dad did Special Effects on TR and I was on the set for a lot of it. Probably the coolest movie set for a 10 year old to be on.
me too 🙂
Wow…what an experience that must have been!! I envy you. Lucky guy!!
omg i remember you!
@@cmtptr yeah 🙂
@@cmtptr Nope.
Rich Evans being a Midwest hermit who never gets on a plane really feels right.
I'm pretty sure Rich Evans doesn't need a plane to fly, anyway.
At school one of my science teachers spent years writing to Arnold Schwarzenegger asking for permission to use the scene where he's suffocating on the surface of Mars on the 'physics intranet' as an illustration of pressure. Eventually got permission and he was so happy to be able to use it. I hope that intranet site is saved somewhere and hasn't just been deleted, it was a true work of art.
Imagine having vacation memories implanted in your head like this and coming back to your ordinary life and being around your wife and your co-workers, all of whom you have incredibly vivid memories of brutally murdering.
Real relaxing vacation. Really sets you up to go back to your working life refreshed.
@@sharpeslass5452 Oh I am not denying its value as catharsis, but it does feel like the perfect recipe for a psychotic break.
@@sharpeslass5452 Glad to hear it!
@@sharpeslass5452 i am very pro-gun and I have never once found catharsis in imagining shooting up my workplace. Get help, weirdo.
@@nadavegan so the little sunglasses emoticon wasn't enough to tip you off that post was ironic huh
@@KairuHakubi no, because I don't speak Psycho. Maybe you can translate.
Total Recall was the single greatest movie theater experience of my life. In my small town, movies were never that busy, or at least I never went to a big opening night. For this one the lines were around the block at our downtown theater. It was an old stage theater converted for movies and it had a balcony that had never been used in my lifetime and they opened it for this and it was packed. The crowd was so loud with their cheering that sometimes you couldn't hear the dialogue, which is sometimes annoying, but this time I was into it. When the lady changed the colors of her fingernails there were oohs and aahs from the audience. The escalator guy becoming a human shield caused gasps. And of course when Quaid suggests brunette for his choice of female the girls in the crowed hissed. I remember during the big action people were stomping their feet and you could feel the theater shake. Again, I wouldn't like it for every movie but it was a very memorable experience.
Is this for real or u joking? No way people went that crazy for movies back in 90
@@chrisd653 why do you say that? We were the Star Wars generation. We loved movies!
@@FanboyFilms wow. I guess I'm so jaded and used to everyone getting wild over marvel movies.
Also, I was only four in 1990 lol.
@@chrisd653 I was about 15 and I hadn't seen a response quite that big before. When the Star Wars special editions came out in '97 and Episode I in '99 those were also huge.
They were spot on with the Johnny Cab- it's just like a self-driving Tesla- it crashes into things and bursts into flames.
Johnny cab never hurt nobody
I remember once reading that Verhoeven does his violence so grotesque because he believes it to be silly how numb we have grown to it, that is why he pushed the boundaries with all of his action (and to an extension, the stories he tolds) being so cynical, senseless and gratuitus, sometimes in a way that is very disturbing for the audiences of a mainstream movie.
That's an awesome way of looking at violence in movies. Thanks for sharing that
@@xDonaldAndersonx - No problem :)
I remember there was a video on YT that went deeper on the subject, but I can't remember the name of the channel.
Which I consider more than a little ironic, because- I mean, you can't hold him responsible for the desensitization of north american audiences, obviously. But for me personally? Oh yeah. Oh hell yeah. When I first saw Robocop I was 9 and I had difficulty staying in the room when Kenny bought it, it was just too much. Now Robocop is one of my favourite movies all time, and the insanely graphic violence is a big reason why. Today I'm a horribly cynical middle-aged man who can actually cope with the world a little bit, partially because of the violent movies I watched as a child. Thanks for the desensitization, Paul!
@@brew1116 - Kind of the same for me, as I grew desensitized to movie gore by playing Mortal Kombat game as a kid. Yet still, that's more on us for watching things that weren't deemed for us.
@@Jean-Paul-Lane-Valley You say it like it's a bad thing.
There's something so heartwarming about when Mike really just comes out and says he loves a film because he's usually so sarcastic and even stuff he likes he sort of half-assedly talks it up, I love that he just said 'one of the greatest fucking movies ever made'..
I love this running gag of editing Rich so that any time he misspeaks, it’s made to appear even worse. I have to believe he didn’t actually say “Beckinsdale” again after 26:40 and it’s just Jay reusing the audio from a few seconds earlier 😂
lollololol never change rich
Mike's not above the odd gaff... pretty sure I just heard him make up a new word...scerenic???
You're absolutely correct. I listened back a few times, the 2nd time he says it you can hear a slight cut before "Kate" and the volume is slightly louder than the audio before and after the edit.
Haha it is edited, nice catch
Why would Jay have edited this? Pretty sure it’s Mike
The short story is a little weird, but basically the main character goes to recall to get some fun memories of being a secret agent on mars, only to find out that he was basically a war criminal who was putting down the political leaders of mars, but had the memories suppressed for his and the earth government's protection. Eventually the government convinces him to suppress the memories again, but to give him fun action memories of a different thing that didn't happen. So he goes to a shrink to find a better fictional memory to use, and comes up with one where he was a child and befriended aliens who liked him so much they agreed to not blow up the earth.
Only to find out that actually happened to, and he had the memories suppressed.
So the canon answer is that the main character is actually subconsciously picking to receive memories that were suppressed when he goes to get them implanted.
Also it's interesting how they managed to merge the two stories together so well in the movie.
@@LanceThumping Or that the way they make you feel as though those things really happened to you is by making you believe the fake memories were just suppressed memories.
@@MenachemSchmuel not in the short story, as its talked about without the protagonists knowledge.
So thats where the aliens in the movie which was mentioned a couple times came from
@@LanceThumping Sorta? Philip K. Dick was great at writing looping plots that make you able to parse out but also wonder how reliable the narration is. My fave of his is ubik and he is just one of those writers that kitchen sink their stories.
In the novelization, in a scene when they are running (I think it's just after Quaid shoots Lori in the face) and Richter is chasing them, Quaid asks Melina: "What did you do before all this?", and Melina gives the prompt answer: "I was modeling for Recall. Why?"
Oh, that's clever. Now we don't know whether Quaid dreamed of Melina because he had actual memories of her, or only implanted memories from a previous visit to Recall.
My grandfather Robert Quincy Riley designed and built the Johnny Cab car, and then was paid to let them use it in the movie.
He passed recently sadly, I love seeing the car in the movie and other people enjoy it.
That's cool your grandfather was very talented. I think eventually when self driving cars are ubiquitous the government/corporations will put characters like Johnny Cab in.
I almost shit myself in disbelief when Mike said he thought it was fuckin terrible after watching it as an adult. This is my absolute favourite of both Verhoeven and Arnolds movies. And this is such a Mike movie.
Great pick, there’s a lot of great Arnold movies. Mine is maybe Predator.
@@ethanwalker3519 terminators 1-3
shat.
@@VadimBolshakov you mistyped 1-2
Was mid sip of my coffee during that part and almost did a spit take.
You all meme, but it’s genuinely been incredible seeing Rich’s self-esteem and confidence grow over the last decade. He’s honestly cool as fuck.
Honestly, Ive come to greatly appreciate Rich as the one who often brings the most inciteful and enlightening anal-sis and breakdowns of movies. He's a pretty sharp guy!
Makes me want to see Milwaukee
Rich has been awesome from the start.
I only want the best for Rich, he deserves any clout that comes his way. Although being on Ellen will be hard to top!!
@@sweatyhaggis4303 Stopped drinking and got engaged! Good shit. I stopped drinking... but I'm not sure viable wife material still exists in this country, I've looked. I'm no pony ride myself but holy shit.
"There's footage somewhere of excessive gore" *Rich Evans, cackling maniacally.*
He's channeling his inner Jay.
I saw Total Recall on opening weekend. I think I was 8. Saturday morning my parents come downstairs and say we're going to see it... my dad wanted to see the three-breasted woman. The theater was packed. The movie blew my mind and changed how I saw pregnancy forever.
8????
@@vegeta8169 or 9
fucking top quality dad. Mine was definitely not that cool when I was 8
but by the time I was 16 he was renting Heavy Metal for us, so it all evened out.
Mike's reaction to the "Dennis Quaid" thing is one of the best RLM moments of all time. I can see his entire thought process play out entirely in his facial expressions: at first he's genuinely confused, trying to figure out what Dennis Quaid has to do with anything and what the hell Rich is talking about. Then he instantly understands what happened in Rich's brain and laughs because it should've been obvious immediately, and then the laughter becomes more and more uncontrollable, and meanwhile Rich just continues to talk unaware of what Mike is going through until he finally notices the laughter.
Its staying in, you know its staying in.
8:17 Mike absolutely *drinking and savoring* the delight he feels at hearing Rich's mistake, like he's letting a caramel melt in his mouth
Mike explaining the correct pronunciation of Kate Beckinsale and then Rich saying it wrong anyway is a classic as well. I’m wondering if there wasn’t some slight of hand with the edit.
It's also funny because they reviewed Enemy Mine recently, which stars Dennis Quaid :D
Rich asking how to say Beckinsale and mike editing in him saying incorrectly is hilarious
Nice catch!
Wtf? Do androids dream of electric sheep? is like the best book title of all time. Sums up the entire premise of the story without giving too much away and is super unique.
I mean it's very Philip k dick. If you like title style or not is subjective.
It doesn't make sense, because you don't dream of sheep, you count them to fall asleep. Dreaming of sheep isn't a thing!
@@bombdatacenters Touché.
@@bombdatacenters Deckard aspired to own an electric sheep. To the point he dreamed about them. The title plays into the philosophical question of his world pertaining to the ability of artificial intelligence to have wants or aspirations like humans.
@@skullkrusher4078 Oh, maybe I should have read the book before having such a strong opinion.
Here's a weird idea. We see scenes with Cohagen and the other bad guys WITHOUT Arnold, which is significant. We see them talk and interact with each other, despite the fact that Arnold isn't there to see it. You would think a computer simulation would run the computer people in the background when they are "off screen", as bits of data. Or freeze them until it's their turn to show up again. Something along those lines. A simulator would only show the the simulated elements to actual flesh and blood participants, who are the only ones that have the cognition to perceive the simulation. If the movie takes place as a dream, why does the simulator create these unseen acts? I know I'm overthinking it, but that is my argument for the movie being in reality, and Arnold IS a spy. I don't REALLY believe all this, it's just fun to ponder.
That's a great point - but if it IS all in Arnold's head / a simulation, couldn't that could still be possible? Like how in a dream you sometimes have 3rd person omniscience.
@@luckyduckydrivingschool3615 If Arnold did witness them in that way, he would have been tipped off to their plans, at least enough to make his next move with some clairvoyance. You'd think he'd at least mention it to someone he trusts. Unlike a normal dream, Arnold is witnessing it as if real, thanks to either being hooked up to their special brain poking machine, or that it really is happening. He'd experience them as if they he suddenly shifted to a new consciousness for a time. Even if he only "dreamed" these visions while asleep in the simulation, it still doesn't make sense that the computer would go to all that trouble for no real value. Especially because we can see the visions don't leave an impression on Arnold, why would the computer persist with them anyway?
@@BigALittleARon Maybe it's like a cutscene in a video game
I think that's a fantastic argument. The movie is obviously conceived of as being open to interpretation, and I think that it's very much by design that you actually CAN interpret the movie at face value, this being a point to argue that position.
Elder scrolls 4 had npcs live regular lives, including sleeping and eating.
Somebody once discovered if you take the food from the prison guards, they will kill and rob the prisoners in order to maintain their programming.
1:59 "This will not be a compare and contrast show"
*proceeds to compare and contrast all throughout the episode*
Never change, Mike. Love you guys.
Mike: "I don't really like gore."
Also Mike: "So much needless death and violence. It's great."
Hack Fraud!
He likes gore when it's funny and not trying to be just disgusting.
"Needless death and violence is great, as long as it's not so bloody that it hurts my tummy".
I love when Mike and Rich talk nerdy science fiction, they get so into it and clearly think things out
We often talk about how handsome Rich Evans is. Rarely giving him credit for his intellect.
Hes more than just eye candy 🍬
Mike Remembers being grossed out by man being used as human shield, Rich remembers loving it, I remember almost having a panic attack when Arnold removes a ping-pong ball through his nostril.
Don't forget the eyeballs oh jeez
Right?!?
The revelation that Rich refers to his grandma as Nanu is the most wholesome thing
RIP Nanu. You raised a legend.
You can find this out a lot earlier. Mike refers to her as "Nanu" several times, usually referencing the filming of Gorilla Interrupted and trashing her old house.
Monkey Man Gets His, which that old VHS footage is from, is floating around in the ether.
I wouldn't recommend it. (Other earlier work like The Grabowskis and their pyrite centered musical is worth digging up though.)
@@4Everlast
Nanaue
@@4Everlast Rich's grandma is the shark from suicide squad confirmed
Andrew Freund is most known for his pull quote on the DVD release of Total Recall (2012) where he claims that the re-make of Total Recall is better than the original. Mr. Freund was presumably financially compensated for this MySpace quote.
Videos with Mike and Rich honestly give me that warm feeling of catching up with my best friend. Where we just end up talking about films, games and the same old quotes that still make us laugh after years apart.
"It's staying in!"
**Rich does the "fuck! ... I know" look**
Fun fact:
There is a scene where Johnny Cab says to arnold Schwarzenegger "Hell of a day, isn´t it?".
In the German version he burps very loud and long. I am not kidding.
I checked all audio tracks on my blu ray (Englisch, Spanisch, French, etc.) and the German version is the only one where he burps.
I don´t kow why they did that and I can´t find any other information whatsoever about the German burping Johnny Cab.
You can actually find that scene on TH-cam
Well, it's a very german thing to do...
German humour is... rudimentary.
@@urdnal German humor is no laughing matter.
@akqj9 "Scheiss Tag, oder?" is pretty short. Maybe it didn't fit the mouth movement. That's often the reason why they change dialogue.
Seeing the original Total Recall cut next to the modern one is probably the most concise criticism on modern cinema I've ever experienced without words
For me, Total Recall is part of Verhoeven's trinity, with Starship Troopers and Robocop.
The blurring in and out on the face of the love interest at the Recall facility could be (and was probably intended to be) interpreted as him hallucinating her actual face as the image of the woman from his dream.
As someone who grew up in Mexico City, 1990 Total Recall will always have a special place in my heart because not only is it a great movie, but a lot of it was filmed in locations around Mexico City, including a subway station for the subway scenes, and I always thought of all the work they must have done to disguise it just for a few scenes.
No sabía eso.
The brutalism design of the buildings were seen as futuristic and work so well for the film!
@@k.w.2275 brutalism? Never heard of that as a style of architecture
@@MrCae001 oooh boy you are in for a wild ride, look up Boston City Hall and that would be the "premier" example of brutalist architecture
Probably wrong, but im surprised Mexico has a subway system.
Mike is just full of science facts in this one, almost makes you wonder if he could moonlight as some sort of Man, who is a Scientist...
Oh come on that's ridiculous, what would they call him? Man Scientist? Pfft
The Human Scientist.
That escalator scene scarred me as a kid lol
Same.
When your favorite TH-cam channel comments on your other favorite TH-cam channel…heck yeah.
Where did it scar you?
@@SM-ok3sz my brain
After all the people saying it scarred them as a kid I'm now worried I'm a sociopath because these movies I was watching at like 5 or 6 had no effect on me other than I enjoyed it.
I absolutely love the shot at 14:12 where Arnie has just killed 4 people. It is incredibly beautifully with perfect composition. One of the best in all of cinema IMO.
Fred Flintstone was insane to go up against Arnold; buddies or no
One of the best in all of cinema is a bit of a stretch I'd say, but it's a great shot for sure.
9:31 So awesome
Totally
"Is it Beckinsdale or Beckinsale?"
"Beckinsale."
"So anyway Kate Beckinsdale..."
I kept waiting for them to say that the Recall red-pill doctor guy is the same guy that plays the finger waggling game against Data in TNG, but they never did!
Is anyone else deeply disappointed in Mike for not mentioning that the Rekall guy that offered him the pill was Sirna Kolrami in the season 2 TNG episode "Peak Performance"?
Ah, is he the fella who beats Data at Stratagema?
@@HusbandofLois yessir!
Now that you point it out (I didn't notice), all I can say is: My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
Did he mention that the 3 boobed woman played Ensign Sonia Gomez in 2 episodes? She spills coffee on Picard. I was kind of doing other things while this was playing so I don't know if he did.
@@digitalintent I believe he did
Such a simple, but evocative movie.
That line where a mutant asks Arnold if he "wants to know the future" to which he replies "how about the past" is a great example of a quick, throwaway, funny line of dialogue that is actually pretty revealing about the character.
This was like a "holy shit" moment making me realize that characters with amnesia and characters who find out something about the future in films are often practically the same character with the same goals and arcs.
Legit watched this last night and thought, I’d love to hear my RLM friends discuss this for an hour. I don’t care what happens for the rest of the day
I've bought this film on every format and I watched the 4k last week and was still blown away. I hate that they don't make films like this anymore, or ever will again.
Yeah it's lovely in 4k hdr!
To be fair, even back then, nobody made films like this, except Paul Verhoeven.
They will, eventually.
I thought Upgrade from 2018 was a nice callback to these types of movies
@@Lultschful i mean nobody made them as nihilistic as verhoven but there are plenty of badass action movies from the 80’s-90’s, tango and cash for one. jackie chan’s HK stuff from the time, and more recently i feel craig zahler’s films have a similar feeling in terms of visceral gore effects, but not in digestibility as they’re significantly darker.
Man i think its something to be said for the fact that the original still rattles around rent free in my head and i regularly forget theres a new one a decade later
“What the fuck did I do wrong” lives in my head rent free
I have lived in México City my whole life, and when I watched this movie as a kid I loved that many of the earth scenes where filmed in the chabacano metro station and many other plazas. In my daily commutes to highschool and college I always thought "I'm living in total recall baby" specially since the metro hasn't visually changed since the early 80s.
What amazed me as a kid, was the complete lack of health and safety in the movie.
Arnie working construction 5 days a week with ZERO ear protection.
X-Ray machines making you sterile as you walked through them EVERY DAY to work.
Giant fucking mars domes with COUNTLESS glass panels just WAITING to get shattered by some kid with a catapult and a rock.
Everyone in this movie deserved to die from just work related injuries.
Those are weird things to think about as a child haha
The silent point of the movie is that Martian colonization is basically a capitalist theme park, where everything has a price, and workers themselves are commodities. There is no government, so therefore no health and safety regulations. On Earth during this time, it is similar - with full deregulation of industries and private ownership of all vital human resources. This is why the corporations on Mars do everything possible to stop Quaid from starting the reactor and giving everyone free air - because they're making billions charging people for it, and it keeps the workers accepting shitty work conditions and pay to create profit for them.
Could use some work safety regulations yeah lol
What kid is thinking about those kinds of things? All I thought about were the three tittied lady and the horrifying face prosthetics, as a kid AND an adult.
Sounds like the origin story for an Occupational Health and Safety superhero
I was about 10 when my parents took me and my little brother to see this in theatre. The part where Arny rips off Ironsides arms on the elevator, is still burnt into my brain!
"See you at the party, Richter!"
You should have been arrested. This movie is 18 plus. Haha
It could only have been a dream if Arnold witnessed all events. But there are scenes that happened outside of Arnold’s perception, therefore I think it was not a dream.
In my mind, 'Fifth Element' was the last film with this tone -- that fun, grand, sci-fi adventure with a good sense of humor and violence.
I agree. The French (same director as the Professional and Fifth Element) had another opportunity to make a good, non-serious sci-fi action film when that other film came out much later. It was so bad I don't even remember the title or who starred in it, I just remember the two lead actors were models first and always looked vaguely miserable on screen.
The Fifth Element doesn't even remotely come close to the violence in Total Recall. Did you only watch a heavily censored version on TV or something?
@@12ealDealOfficial The director is Luc Besson and you're thinking of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. It was pretty awful, though the first 5 minutes were kinds cool.
Valerian tried and failed horribly
That's one of my favorites. 99% because I had a massive crush on Leeloo but.
Verhoeven has said often that he believes his fascination with gratuitous, graphic violence was borne out of his experiences as a young child during World War II. Seeing dead bodies, mutilated in the streets by bullets and bombs, scarred his psyche and using graphic violence is an outlet for him.
Specifically the odd mixture of finding it horrifying and exciting at the same time. IIRC he mentions waking up to find that an Allied bombing raid had accidentally blown up his neighbour's house
Like Tom Savini's special effects in horror movies being inspired by his experiences in Vietnam.
Verhoeven always struck me as fairly misanthropic. Most of his films center on people being ruthlessly terrible to each other. No doubt a lot of that came from his wartime experiences.
@@troyschulz2318 Yeah, but some of his interviews come off as if he was the only one who saw the war as a kid.
Of course Korben Dallas is justifying the use of gratuitous violence
I always just assume he woke up at the end, I think everything went as intended.
the last quote of the movie is "Kiss me before you wake up."
18:55 Mike, water ice isn't the only form of ice. The ice caps on Mars are carbon dioxide ice, for example. Also, somewhat true to the movie, there is Martian O2 that's locked in the rocks irl. In principle, if the rock were molten, it could release the oxygen as a gas. Terraforming wouldn't happen overnight but it's not nothing.
An atmosphere that was mostly oxygen woul d be deadly poison to most terrestrial life.
The way I remember it, I thought the Martian machine was decomposing the water into Oxygen and Hydrogen, not melting it, but that does leave the problem of having an Oxygen and Hydrogen atmosphere...
Rich being afraid of flying makes sense. I always viewed him as the B.A. Baracus of the RedLetterMedia crew.
My all time favorite Arnold film and it's arguably his greatest acting performance.
He's actually decent at conveying emotion in this one.
It’s weird that Minority Report began development as a sequel to this.
I agree - definitely the best Schwarzenegger film. Nobody agrees with me about this but I am adamant it's true.
@@p0rq Meh, not really.
They originally attempted to adapt Minority Report into a sequel to TR. They failed... miserably.... then put everything down, walked away, and went back to drinking.
Years later MR was adapted.
@@robfinlay8058 The Running Man
@@unityofvitality-5875 Total Agree
why does he have to die at the end? I think he fulfilled the total recall mission as they created for him. He might have just woke up on the chair and then went home
I for one, find Paul Verhoevens use of violence in all his films utterly hilarious. Robocop was one of the funniest things I had ever seen because to me it was so obvious that it was intended to be over the top. When I recently watched Total Recall, I was laughing out LOUD at the "meat shield" scene. I also loved the fact that Arnold and Ironside violently shoved/tackled every person in their way during the chases. The body language is obvious that they were directed to push pedestrians out of the way as violently as possible. There is a guy walking up a staircase later in the movie that Arnold literally shoves so hard he flips off the stairs and falls. Comedy genius.
I definitely believe there is an intentional humor to Verhoevens style that was never understood by like 97% of audiences.
Yeah, Verhoeven is highly satirical. Considered a master in the Netherlands.
Every single time I've seen this film, I always laugh out loud at one moment where Arnold shoves some pedestrian HARD, and he makes a loud 'UGH' sound. It's so random and a throwaway, I don't know why, but it just always gets me. So ridiculous but so good at the same time
@@HipiO7 That part got me also! I LOL'd when that poor civilian backflipped off the escalator. That's when I knew this movie was great.
Schwarzenegger was in a decent amount of legit 10/10 movies. Even though this was made in the 80s I think it holds up and has aged well thanks to the set designs of futuristic architecture, and the way they chose to display the philosophy and societal themes. No other movie looks or feels like this one.
Commando, Terminator 1/2, Predator, Total Recall, Conan, Last Action Hero, True Lies, Jingle All The Way, all classics.
They used to actually have actions stars in high concept action movies. Now action movies are just spy thrillers or giant robot movies. I'd they do make a high concept action movie it's never with a big actions star like the rock and its never made by a big time director. It will star an over the hill actor trying to reinvent himself as an action guy and will be made by a no name hack director with a tiny budget and written by an AI script writer.
@@MrJeanjean2009 Conan is one of the most underrated films of all time
@@MrJeanjean2009 Just take out Jingle All The Way and replace with Kindergarten Cop and Twins and I agree 100%
@@dash4800 So, Rambo Last Blood? Sounds about right.
Total Recall has this oddly warm, nostalgic feeling to me. I remember seeing it on a hotel TV as a seven year old and being freaked out by the scene where they running out of oxygen.
This is why practical effects are so effective. They still have a sense of realism. Whereas when it’s CGI, your brain just doesn’t fall for it and it feels like you’re watching a cartoon. That sense of danger or suspension of disbelief just isn’t as strong.
At around the 10 minute mark I discovered that Rich Evans is actually 10 years younger than me. I am going to need some time with that...
I've been having this same debate off and on again with my friends for years. It is absolutely delightful that this movie endures so well. It is in my top 10 for life.
RLM content more entertaining than 95% of current movie output. Loved this.
Effects work in this is all around damn near flawless. One of the last huge projects prosthetic makeup effects GENIUS Rob Bottin spearheaded & that's a damn shame. Plus I think the mixture of miniature & optical effects used to portray the exteriors of Mars in those big long tracking shots, or later when the camera's swirling around the mine to get a better look at all the giant unheated rods is staggeringly inventive. Kinda like the aesthetics of it more than I do seeing so many films now just shrugging it all away with CGI.
I think it’s all about the artistry & how well the production team/director can integrate everything. Sometimes a big matte painting can constrain a scene, but if you work within the constraints & have a great matte painter you can have something that is far more effective than a CGI background that is more versatile, but is just not well thought-out
It's a good call... CG gets overused now, it's got to be super-detailed, have so much going on (thinking of the remake or Transformers). If they just used it to make things like that train shot, but just more realistic, it would be sufficient.. but no, it has to pan in all sorts of wonderful ways and lens flare all over the place (who'd want to work on a bridge like that, Star Trek reboot!). I think that's why the Dune remake is good, a lot of their CG is slower and just enables certain things to be in screen, but even that still has lost a lot of character.
@@fokeyjo absolutely, in the right hands, CGI can be quite effectively employed, Dune ABSOLUTELY being the most current & shining example. I think mainly due to the director being such a precise & detail oriented visual stylist who pre-planned in extraordinary detail way before ever day 1 on the set exactly how CGI would be employed to enhance & expand his overall vision. For similar reasons Matt Reeves' two Planet of the Apes prequels register as SO stunning for his skill at integrating on set photography utilizing actors as the apes & WETA's digital effects translations, no doubt enhanced by Andy Serkis' suggestions. Too often this isn't the case & the difference between reality & CG is jarring.
Watched this in cinema couple of weeks ago with my dad..70....and nephew...21 who had never seen it blew them away and me again ....I just turned 50 👍👍👍👍👍
In the novelization, Melina says she was a Model for Rekall
As for Total Recall ditching the "Is it real?"-angle after the red pill scene, it makes perfect sense. Either Quaid is really a secret agent, then Cohaagen and Richter tried that angle and know it won't work because Quaid already comitted to being sure it's all real. And if Quaid really is dying at Recall, then he comitted to the fantasy by refusing the red pill and killing the doctor. Either way: The character is comitted to live through this story and this is reflected in the lack of ambiguous scenes.
I always interpreted it as being a fake memory, but that the red pill stuff was part of the fantasy. They had to have simulated that drop of sweat, after all.
@MadnerKami - I agree. I was thinking the same thing when they brought up that point. Either way, the character has committed to that path and the ambiguity no longer matters. It's an interesting twist on the "is it all a dream?" trope to let it "resolve" partway through the movie instead of using it to make an ambiguous ending.
If it were a novel it would be easier to weave doubt throughout the narrative, as Dick famously does in Ubik. But a film has a lot less opportunities to do this kind of thing. I thought the film handled it pretty well.
Isn't it punctuated with the entire wall blasting away and tons of bad guys running to grab him right after that?
Like.. There was a moment of pause, but the second he committed to it they literally exploded back into full gear.
@@ArchHippy What the doctor says though is that Quaid is in a "free form delusion that he's inventing himself as he goes along" - so, the bead of sweat is just another part of that delusion. The doctor doesn't fit into what is now cemented into Quaid's head as real, so he's more likely to see him as being co-opted by Cohagen than being at Rekall. Because he strongly suspects this, the bead of sweat appears, meaning essentially, that the image of the doctor is being corrupted by Quaid's mind as it works to make him fit the delusion.
I dig how Rich pronounces the name Beckonsdale, asks for the correct pronunciation from Mike, who enunciates out Beck en sale , and then Rich immediately says Beckonsdale again.
That absolutely murtled me
I thought they just edited in the first take's audio of "Beckonsdale" into the second take.
I'll never forget the first time I watched this movie. I was 16, high and drunk and had just jumped back in through my window after sneaking out. This movie came on and the music immediately told me this would be something special.....I passed out at the "Open your mind part".
what more can be said? Total Recall is a goddamn masterpiece, thanks in no small part to Verhoeven giving the finger to Hollywood and going all out
Mike hasn't cared about anything but Ghost hunters for the last 8 years and this is still the best movie review youtube.
You mean Ghost Adventures. Mike's never mentioned Ghost Hunters
There's lots of fun stuff in this that they rightly touch on, but my fave might be Dan O'Bannon being pissed at them changing his original ending. The original motive was supposed to be that the alien reactor only had a Quaid shaped handprint instead of just a generic alien one, and that he was actually a synth copy created by the reactor/aliens itself. There's a quote floating around online about it where it was supposed to be another layer on the "is it real/fake" thing, about how wiping his memories and sending him to earth is the only way Cohagen can control him and stop him becoming a new God, and that when he touches it all the actual memories of the aliens/his real origin come back to him (a lot of that ended up in the novelisation). O'Bannon said it was a way of explaining how he survives all the madness/is able to kill everyone in an in-universe way IE: because he isn't human but equally it might all be a fantasy. Pretty neat IMO.
So they messed with the same type of question in both total recall and blade runner. I don’t understand, did they just think audiences wanted a concrete answer and ending?
noice
@@natelax1367 not sure. I know in BR they changed it because they thought it became too dark and they wanted at least one human connection to the film (which makes Scott's walking back on the thing even more dumb years later). I think they just didn't want to tip their hand too much like the guys say. You'd have to include a bunch of alien stuff right at the end.
King v Kubrick quality take
Here's the quote: That wasn't supposed to be a three-fingered Martian hand print [on the machine]. That was supposed to have been a print of [Quaid's] hand which matched only his hand. Quaid, Earth's top secret agent, went to Mars and entered this compound. The machine killed him and created a synthetic duplicate. He is that synthetic duplicate. He cannot be killed because he can anticipate danger before it happens. He is also omnipotent and because he cannot be killed, Earth wants to kill him but cannot. That's why they go to all the trouble to erase his brain to make him think he's nobody. It's the only way they can control him. Audiences don't question it when movie heroes go through adventures and don't get killed. I thought it was clever to actually have a reason for it. At the end of the picture, Quaid puts his hand on the device and it all comes back to him, who he really is. His total recall of his identity is that he is a creation of a Martian machine. He is, in effect, a resurrection of the Martian race in a synthetic body. He turns and says to all the other characters, "It's gonna be fun to play God".
"It's in his head" is the boring interpretation. Whenever a movie gives you two options, always pick the cooler one.
It's like in Slaughterhouse Five, you COULD interpret it that he's in a coma, but where's the fun in that? Much more fun to imagine he's time traveling and going to outerspace and reliving his death 500 times
I also watched this as a small child with my father for the 1st time - I have a vivid memory of my Mom being mad about it. Thanks Dad I love you