I have a serious problem, in that I am compelled to watch every terrible translation of a Philip K. Dick story to the big screen. I am a huge fan of Dick, Philip K., I've read most of his work, and it's always exciting to watch a new director tear a quirky, paranoid story into bland strips of Action! with mass market appeal. To be fair, some of movies most true to the story have flopped terribly (*cough* Imposter *cough*), an others have turned out pretty decent despite broad liberties taken in translation. My favorite example of the latter for a long time was Total Recall. The movie starts roughly similar to the short story, and then flies away madly with Arnold Schwarzenegger bouncing a bloody path through typical 80s SF goons like a inflatable, musclebound clown, culminating an amazingly ridiculous scene where his eyes are bulging oh-so-believably out of his head (oh no, inflatable Arnold is going to pop!), before being saved by a gust of wind from a terraforming machine and a brief departure from the laws of physics. So, when I saw they were remaking Total Recall, and it was being helmed by Colin Farrell, I just kind of sighed, because of course I was going to watch it.
The setting is, unsurprisingly, completely different from either the first movie or the original story, although that's not a huge problem. In order to make writing the rest of the script easier, the world of the future has been demolished by some chemicals or something, rendering most of the planet uninhabitable (unless you're wearing army surplus gas masks), except for England and Australia, which have been given futuristic names clearly not worth remembering. England uses the Australians for cheap labor and resources, and transports goods and people between the two nations using a system called "the Fall", which is a train that runs through the center of the earth between the two nations. This is an idea that appeals to the nerd in me, but digging a hole down to the earth's core and then up the other side seems like an odd investment of resources in a post-apocalyptic hellscape.
The beginning of the story, again, is the only part that remains true to the original Dickian tale. A guy walks into a memory store (and asks, "do you know why I'm here?" Wakka, Wakka!), ahem, and asks for a fake memories of a vacation as a spy, which may or may not be what the viewer watches for the rest of the movie. This is not much of a spoiler, as the central conceit is not really important to how the movie plays out. It is more of a casual nod to the source material, after which the narrative again flies away madly with Colin Farrell parkouring a relatively bloodless path through the leftover robots from I-robot and some dollar-store stormtroopers like an expressionless, magically animated mannequin discovered shortly before shooting began, culminating in the same generic running, gunning, punching and jumping sequence that we've all seen several times over every summer for the last 15 years (give or take).
The core of the story is Farrell's Douglas Quaid running and gunning from his slim, pretty, brunette wife (Kate Beckinsdale) to his slim, pretty, brunette co-conspirator/lover (Jessica Biel), both of whom I have a hard time telling apart and spend the rest of the movie fighting over him in scenes that confused me greatly. The action sequences are okay. There are robots, and cool shark helicopters and hot wheels race tracks for grown ups that go upside down and a bomb throwing contest in a completely impractical elevator maze in the least space efficient hotel in the known universe and the oh-so-subtley foreshadowed zero-g shooting sequence in the Fall elevator as it passes through the earth's core. It's the same stuff you've been seeing for a while now, but at least the props are fun. Farrell does a passable job as handsome action actor, but fails to deliver any emotional resonance or even facial expressions that might give the audience a reason to care about the character. Bryan Cranston was okay as the villain, and I was pleased to see him here, but wish he'd been given more to work with.
Have you ever listened to an album so much, that it becomes hard to focus on the music/words at all, because you've heard it so much your brain wants to classify it as white noise and ignore it? That's what this movie felt like to watch, from shortly after the beginning, all the way up until Cranston's character pays for the sins of his TV counter-part in the same fiery explosion we've all seen hundreds of times before. It's the same explosions, same sequences, same CGI and same actors that you've seen jump, hump, fight and pose in a summer movie, remixed slightly for your amusement, excitement or, failing all those things, distraction and mild titillation. Which, surprisingly, isn't to say I hated it, there were some neat ideas in the props department and world imagining, but this one's really only for the die-hard SF, action and parkour enthusiasts. It's mostly just a generic mash-up of I-robot, Mass Effect and Tron. I give it a two sigh rating. In the end, I think I was just hoping for a lot more Dick, Philip K..
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