"CAN REMEMBER IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE" EDITION
FIND OUT MORE HERE <—CLICK THIS LINK
Hear that life may have existed on Mars after all? Seems like a good time to drop a Total Recall fan edit :)
Total Recall is one of my favorite movies, and was Paul Verhoeven's second blockbuster hit after his masterpiece Robocop. But unlike Robocop, I always felt that Robocop failed to go that extra-mile. Where you can watch Robocop pretty much at any time and find that it still holds up, Total Recall does feel a bit long in the tooth. I think it is because the studio knew they had a hit on its hands, so they didn't give the filmmakers that little bit of extra time to polish it up and develop everything. So, that's where us fan-editors can come to the rescue!
+++HIGHLIGHTS+++
I wanted to do a few things that fans have longed for in a Total Recall fan edit. Restoring lost deleted moments was on the top of my list. Mostly gore that was toned down to get an hour rating. But I also I wanted to give Total Recall that same fleshed out feel that Robocop had. So you can get to see more of everything! More of Earth. More of Mars. Also, some subplots get more love here. The alien subplot is more thoughtful and pays off better here now IMO. We get a more varied story of the freedom fighters rather than just generic shots of them being killed. Those little characters and moments really made Total Recall fun and even endearing on some level. So I went farther with that. The bar scene now is completely fleshed out, and more hardcore, since the original was like Mos Eisley for adults, and Total Recall felt like it was ahead of its time as it was fantasy for adults similar to what we experience with shows these days like Game of Thrones.
The big change here is in the story itself. I wanted to double down on the Philip K.Dick aspect here, as it was his short story in print after all that inspired this. Many have called this movie a better Matrix. Yeah, story-wise I can buy into that argument. It just didn't go far enough in it's idea that you can have several realities just as real and important as the one you are experiencing, provided you see them as layers of the same human experience you are having. So I found a way to include an extra scene that really makes us wonder now what is true and not true about Quaid's predicament. And it helped me solve a small thing that always bugged me about Total Recall. During the final fight, Arnold is strapped into a memory chair, and then left alone to basically break out and kill the bad guys. Given the fun James Bond stuff up to that point, I think I expected SOME gadget or card up Quaid's sleeve that could at least explain how he would break free from his restraints. Otherwise, we are left with a different kind of James Bond moment, where the bad guys leave the hero in an easily escapable trap after telling him their sinister plot. The "I Love Lucy" wink and nod you find in the poster art here, plays into this trippy solution I came up with-- in a way that makes the movie a little more like a David Lynch movie, which is one big hook of this film. The rare case where the audience WANTS to go down a rabbit hole of existential pondering of our existence (how many movies get us into that mindset?)
But also this is a movie about MARS and grounded action sci-fi in the spirit of the Road Warrior! And how many kick as movies about Mars exist anyways? This is the only one I can think of. So much of the TLC that went into this fan edit is make this truly the epic it wanted to be.
ENJOY!
And while you are it....
ENTER THEATER!
