Total Recall
What is reality when you can't trust your memory?
Metadata
| Director | Paul Verhoeven |
| Year | 1990 |
| Writer | Ronald Shusett, Dan O'Bannon, Gary Goldman |
| Stars | Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rachel Ticotin, Sharon Stone, Ronny Cox, Michael Ironside |
The movie in 3 sentences
What is reality when you can’t even trust your own memory?
Total Recall follows an ordinary construction worker who keeps having dreams about Mars. He decides to visit a company that implants fake vacation memories, but the procedure goes horribly wrong and seems to uncover another personality buried inside him. Suddenly, people he thought were his friends are trying to kill him, and clues left behind by his former self point him toward Mars and an underground resistance movement.
The fun of the movie is that you’re never completely sure what’s real. Is he actually a secret agent whose memory was erased? Is the life he remembers fake? Or is everything happening after the memory procedure just part of the fantasy he paid for? The movie keeps that question hanging over the whole story.
You could almost think of Total Recall as part of a loose Philip K. Dick trilogy alongside Blade Runner and Minority Report. Even on its own, though, Total Recall is one of the great sci-fi movies of the 1990s.
And, of course, there’s also the pure entertainment of watching the future governor of California absolutely jacked, shooting people, and delivering Arnold Schwarzenegger one-liners.