- TOTAL REMAKE: “Wait, didn’t I have an Austrian accent the last time I did this?”
Why is it so fucking hard for movie studios to get Philip K. Dick right? If you’re adapting a Philip K. Dick story to film, you need a solid dose of futurism and glossy technology, but you also need an organic, druggy feel underlying the movie, too. Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly had some flaws, but it nailed the mood: Everything should feel like a bad trip, where every level of reality feels woozy and suspect and plasticized.
The creators of the Total Recall remake simply don’t understand this. To them, a Philip K. Dick story is just a reason to add a science-fictional sheen to your basic brain-dead spy thriller. It’s a mistake many other filmmakers have made (see also: Paycheck, Next, Impostor), and it’s an absolutely baffling choice. Total Recall is at least pretty to look at, in the way that all movies with a unified design sense are pretty to look at: The future world we’re given here is yet another drab dystopia, but it’s a compact, monstrous labyrinth of concrete and rain and human-pacifying screens splayed on every available surface. The premise of this world is stupid—chemical warfare has destroyed all but two urban areas on the planet, and the residents of one urban area, in Australia, must commute through the center of the earth every day to the other urban area in Great Britain to serve their economic betters through drudgework—but at least a design team took the premise seriously and created some beautiful, claustrophobic sets for the characters to run around in.
But those characters aren’t worth your time…(Keep reading.)