Whether fairly or not, Action movies are often stereotypically thought of as one of the least-thought provoking film genres out there, which is a stark contrast to the way Science-Fiction is typically perceived, with its speculative tales about what science, technology, and the future in general may hold in store for the human species and experience, serving as a sort of "escapism" that is nonetheless still rooted solidly in our day-to-day reality. However, in 1990, Paul Verhoeven built on his previous moviemaking experience to make the two seemingly polar opposites meet in fairly spectacular fashion with
Total Recall, having his cake and eating it too by getting to indulge in tons of gratuitous, non-stop bloody action, while still also finding time to intellectually stimulate us with its intriguing "real or false?" reality narrative, with the film, to paraphrase
Tom Breihan, getting to blow up characters' heads AND viewers' minds at the same time.
Set in the year 2084, it tells the story of Douglas Quaid, an Earthbound construction worker who has recurring dreams/nightmares of visiting Mars, which inspires him to make that dream a reality (sort of) by visiting Rekall, a company that specializes in implanting memories in people's minds, in order to get the escape from his mundane daily life he so desperately pines for. However, the procedure goes haywire, causing Quaid to seemingly uncover an interplanetary espionage conspiracy in the process, and forcing him to get his "ass to Mars" for real, all the while dodging bullets, traitorous wives, and the tantalizing possiblity that none of it is even happening for real.
Of course, even without that final detail, Recall would still be memorable for a number of other aspects, such as its unique, endlessly imaginative vision of the future, with a new detail coming pretty much every moment to help further build its futuristic world, whether it be robotic taxicab drivers, holographic decoy emitters, or gigantic X-Ray walls, the latter rendered with then-groundbreaking CGI effects. However, that's balanced out by the film's non-stop showcase of practical models, prosthetics, and animatronics otherwise, which give Rob Bottin's various creations a much-needed tactility, and help to render a surprisingly vivid sense of body horror here in the process (courtesy of David Cronenberg(!) and
Alien screenwriter Dan O'Bannon's contributions to the production), to the point that people apparently approached Marshall Bell for years afterward and non-jokingly asked him to lift his shirt so they could see "Kuato" for themselves.
But of course, the most fascinating aspect of
Recall is courtesy of the involvement of the ultimate "what is real? Sci-Fi scribe himself, Phillip K. Dick, whose 1966 story
We Can Remember It For You Wholesale provides the basic skeleton onto which the meaty, Arnie-signature thrills are laid on top of here, nicely balancing all the mindless action out with a relentless, conspiracy-laden plot and a rich abundance of ideas, with the many narrative rug pulls never feeling unnecessarily convoluted, even as the bursts of exposition come at us as rapid-fire as the automatic weapons do at Quaid. It's the kind of movie where it's possible to read pretty much every detail one way or the other, making for endless possibilities, which results in a nice meta-commentary on the very nature of film itself, since, why does it matter if everything is really happening here or not, since we don't care if every other movie ever made is technically a false reality of its own?
Add onto that a nastily fun sense of humor (can you say, midget prostitutes with knives?), and a strong influence on similar films since, with its reality-warping narrative and surprisingly progressive, egalitarian gender dynamics setting the stage for multiple genre-redefining actioners, whether they be the basic story of
The Matrix, or the now iconic post-apocalyptic partnership between Max & Furiosa in
Fury Road, and
Total Recall will definitely give you the "ride of your life", and then some.