- While many action and sci-fi films are escapist in nature, very few of them are explicitly about the fantasy of escaping. What would it really be like to suddenly wake up one day and be an action hero? You'd probably be big and muscular, like Arnold Schwarzenegger. You'd likely find yourself engaging in an above-average amount of gunfights and fisticuffs. Traitors would pop up at every turn, and you'd have to dispose of them in the most cartoonish manner possible, which usually means a graphic death accompanied by a good one-liner. As one character in Total Recall points out, it's only natural to assume that you'd "get the girl, kill the bad guys, and save the entire planet!"
- Oddly enough, that's exactly what happens to Douglas Quaid (Schwarzenegger). Haunted by dreams (or is it memories?) of visiting Mars, Quaid visits a company called Rekall that specializes in creating virtual vacations for its clients by planting false memories. Sure enough, he wakes up to find that his best friend (Robert Costanzo) wants to kill him and that his wife (Sharon Stone) knows more kickboxing than she ever let on. More armed thugs (Michael Ironside, Michael Champion) come streaming out of the woodwork, and maybe all of this has to do with the economic domination of Mars by a colonialist type named Vilos Cohaagen (Ronny Cox). "Get your ass to Mars," Quaid!
- Amazingly, the Red Planet is even more dangerous and surreal than Earth. Mutants abound, including deformed taxi drivers (Mel Johnson Jr.), three-breasted hookers (Alexia Robinson), and men with creepy alien babies as conjoined twins (Marshall Bell). Quaid even meets Melina (Rachel Ticotin), the literal girl of his dreams, "brunette, athletic, sleazy and demure." But how much of this is real and how much is implanted memories? The film is wisely ambiguous on this point, although the perfectly centered gunshot wounds and absurdly exaggerated deaths in Mars' low atmospheric pressure suggest a certain level of fiction. Whether it is director Paul Verhoeven's fiction or Quaid's is probably irrelevant considering that Total Recall delivers enough explosive action and dazzling special effects to satisfy anybody's fantasies. In the words of the android cab driver (Robert Picardo), "We hope you enjoyed the ride!"
- Sortof based on the short story by Philip K. Dick.
