Acting on a mysterious tip-off he locates a device, apparently hidden by himself before his memory was wiped, on which a recording of his previous self spills the beans - he was once in the employ of the organisation and stationed on Mars.
The plot really kicks in when Quaid finds himself pursued by agents of the ubiquitous "organisation" and his wife tries to kill him. His whole life is a pre-fabricated fantasy. Quaid discovers - or seems to, at least - that his entire memory has been erased and replaced with a manufactured version. But during the implant procedure something goes disastrously wrong. a memory implant service who promise him a virtual trip to Mars with all the trimmings. In an attempt to scratch his inexplicable itch, Quaid visits Rekall Inc. Quaid's wife (Sharon Stone), can't understand her husband's obsession with the hellish planet, nor why he is so keen to go there. Arnold Schwarzenegger, in one of his last truly effective roles and still the right side of terminal self-parody, plays Doug Quaid an ordinary Earth-bound Joe who is plagued by disturbing dreams of Mars, a politically unstable off-world colony ruled by a corrupt dictator whose draconian control of the air supply is fuelling a revolution. Dick short story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, Total Recall is what 1984 would have been if PlayStation 2 had figured as heavily in George Orwell's formative years as the playing fields of Eton. Total Recall (1990) might be eclipsed by Robocop, but it's still a handy example of the Verhoeven modus operandi: crank the volume to 11, pile on the violence and invite the critics to go fuck themselves.Īnd if it does lack the satirical edge of his other sci-fi outings, it exhibits ample evidence of Verhoeven's queasy sense of humour and kaleidoscopic dystopian fantasies: violent, repressive and liberally splashed with hilarious surrealism. On the other hand, 1996's lapdance epic Showgirls confirmed him as a borderline pornographer and a complete and utter fruitcake.
He quickly established himself as a master of nosebleed sci-fi/action with Robocop in 1987 and has obviously not felt the urge to don a beret or smoke a Gauloise since.Ī series of liberal-baiting blockbusters, including underrated thriller Basic Instinct and the awesome Starship Troopers, confirmed that, in spite of his stylistic volte-face, Verhoeven had retained his auteur's commitment to uncompromising vision. In the late 80s, with a maturing arthouse reputation in his native Holland, he abruptly ditched all vestiges of highbrow aspiration and headed for Hollywood. Something that should be born in mind whenever exposing oneself to Paul Verhoeven's particular brand of sensationalist entertainment is that the man, by a conservative estimate, is as mad as a snake.