Total Recall

1990 Schwarzenegger Version- Real or Dream?

Much of the debate around the 1990 film Total Recall is whether or not it's all a dream at the end, and if Arnold's character Quaid suffered a schizoid embolism, lobotomizing himself, or truly saved Mars.

On the side of it being a dream, we can point towards the lab tech remarking that "Blue Sky on Mars" is new, or the man with the red pill describing the truth of Quaid's situation. Of course, that man's sweat drop betrays him in Quaid's mind, and he gets killed for it. The Rekall scientist says the alien artifacts Quaid requests are a million years old- but it's only half a million years for the reactor, repeated twice. I'm inclined to think a scientist would know the correct dates for her procedure, but be off on the exact archaeological estimates from a planet away.

I'm here to say that I think Total Recall is Quaid's real journey.

I think this because the whole point of Rekall is that it implants false memories. You get a full experience, yes- but those are implanted memories. You don't go around living on Mars for two weeks. An accurate description of how fake memories should work is Quaid at the beginning of the movie. He doesn't get how he could not be who he is, and has memories of a marriage that never existed. During the film, we see Quaid running around, actively experiencing. It's a present situation. If Quaid got lobotomized, he would just be in stasis, turned off. The "memories" being implanted wouldn't be being interpreted by his future/current mind. That mind would have shut down, so the memories wouldn't be accessible, and therefore livable.

I may have taken the fun out of speculation by appealing to logic outside the constraints of the movie, removing the cinematic aspect of storytelling. How else would memories be shown on film if not chronologically? The little bits of narrative that occur when Quaid is knocked out also are either explained away by an appeal to narrative structure or explained as having happened independently of Quaid's mental processing, a.k.a. real.

I'm going with real because that is what I'd like to believe.

Why the Original is Better Than the Remake- SPOILERS

There isn't really a debate about the legitimacy of Quaid's experiences in the remake; it's pretty easy to tell it's all real. But the remake makes a huge mistake in its story. They don't make Hauser a double-agent working for Cohaagen all along. The remake tried to be "grittier" and "realer," more attached to Earth and reality. With this one error, they made it a loss less plausible, which is a component of real-ness.

All throughout the 1990 version, Quaid gets away because Cohaagen WANTS him to. In the remake, not only does Quaid go to his own apartment, which isn't being monitored for some reason, he escapes there in a flying car chase. His girlfriend just finds him, and is successful. Meanwhile, this Cohaagen bad guy is the Chancellor of an entire country. He wants a mandate to go to war, which he does. Yet somehow he doesn't have the manpower to just get Quaid? The infiltration to Kuato makes a hell of a lot more sense than using a fake kill code in Quaid's head to get to Matthias. They could have killed Hauser, as a traitor, and used someone else to get to Matthias. In the 1990 film Cohaagen knows at least part of his agent is loyal, even if it's not the active personality. The remake doesn't make a strong case for Quaid being alive. The Chancellor just goes to war with synthetics anyway! Why couldn't he just do that?

Colin Farrell's fight with Kate Beckinsale is also unrealistic for how jacked he is and how normal-lady-sized she is. In Arnold's fight with Sharon Stone she hits him in the balls a lot, as that is the only way to make that fight fair.