Joe’s Movie Club: Total Recall and Remakes

by | Aug 10, 2024


All of the cool kids and famous YouTubers who talk about movies and physical media often do that while sitting in front a wall displaying thousands of movies, including all the free ones movie companies send them to review. On my YouTube channel I usually sit in a cozy chair in my living room or office. Until recently I didn’t even know how many movies I owned because scattered around what Mary calls our “home theater room” they were, more or less, organized by format. I finally got around to organizing them alphabetically and storing most of them in a cheap bookcase with the overflow and some others, by genre, stored in the metal etagere that’s holding my TV. This process gave me the opportunity to count them and the answer is 510. While doing all this organizing, I took the opportunity to get rid of some duplicates and movies I never want to see again.


Today’s Post by Joe Farace

“Let Me Suggest That You Take A Vacation From Yourself?”—Total Recall (1990)

In an interview once, fellow native Baltimorean John Waters once said that “people shouldn’t try to remake good movies; they should remake bad ones and make then better.” I think that’s because most remakes are not as successful as the film they’re based on and some, like Lost Horizon (1973) when compared to the 1937 version is so bad Burt Bacharach and Hal David, who wrote songs for the soundtrack and were long time collaborators, broke up afterwards.* If you can handle it, search for the Lost Horizon (1973) trailer on YouTube and give it a watch although the sight of Howard Beale singing might upset your equilibrium. The process was too painful for me to even get through the entire trailer .

Total Recalls

Today we take a look at Total Recall (1990) that was a huge hit for Arnold Schwarzenegger  and garnered three Academy Award nominations and even won one. It’s remake, Total Recall (2012) is so different from the original that it’s almost impossible to view it as a remake. That film received no Oscar nominations but Jessica Biel did win the Razzie award for Worst Supporting Actress. (She’s not that bad.) The 2012 film starred Colin Farrell who I still consider the most handsome actor in motion pictures since Tyrone Power. He may lack the muscular presence of Schwarzenegger but is still a helluva fine actor. I’ve been a fan of his since he appeared in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report.

The immediate difference between the two movies is Mars. Most of the 1990 version is set on Mars while the 2012 is completely Earth-bound. One of the things claimed for the latter version is that it’s more faithful to Philip K. Dick’s short story, “We can remember it for you wholesale” than the 1990 version but I don’t know if that’s true. The library doesn’t have a book with the story in it and I’m too much of a cheapskate to buy a book. IMDB claims the Philip K Dick story was an “inspiration” for the remake and the newer film is listed as being based on the original’s screenplay—not the book—even if the screenwriters used the barest of skeletons from the 1990 film for the plot. Does that make the remake good or bad? Nope, it just makes it different.

Other differences: In the remake, Kate Beckinsale plays a part that in the original combines two characters that were superbly portrayed by a young Sharon Stone and delightfully diabolically Michael Ironside. Did the fact that she was married at the time to director Len Wiseman, have anything to do with her having a larger role than Sharon Stone did? The original film was directed with a typical heavy hand by Paul Verhoeven but that doesn’t make it any less fun.

A word about the soundtrack: the 1990 movie’s score was created by the legendary composer Jerry Goldsmith and while listening to it I was struck by it’s resemblance to the Terminator 2 (1991) soundtrack that was composed by Brad Fiedel. So did James Cameron say, “Hey Brad I really liked what Jerry did with Total Recall can you do that for me but amp it up a bit”? To my ear it sure sounds like it.

The truth is that both films are fun watches. I own a Blu-ray of the original and I’m not so sure the practical effects of 1990 hold up to the digital extravaganza of the remake—perhaps to the detriment of the 2012 film. It makes me wonder if the special effects in the 4K version of the Schwarzenegger movie may not look as good as it did in my Blu-ray but ya’ never know.

If you are a fan of imaginative sci-fi, you should probably own both or at least films. The 4K and Blu-ray set of the original film only costs fifteen bucks. I had to watch the 2012 version from a DVD I borrowed from the library.while the Blue-ray of the 2012 film costs less than $9.00. No 4K version of the newer film is available, which in itself may tell you something abut the popularity of the 2012 version. It could be that “something” is that Mr. Schwarzenegger was a much bigger star than Mr. Farrell. But who knows? As I said I enjoyed both films and so will you.

*Years later Bacharach and David reconciled and even worked again together writing a new song for Dionne Warwick. The soundtrack for the 1937 version was composed by four-time Academy award winner Dimitri Tiomkin. For comparison, I just listened to the soundtrack of the 1973 version on YouTube. Just search for “Lost Horizon soundtrack” and you can listen to it too. It’s not that bad and many people think it’s better than the film. I don’t think the music is up to the standard Bacharach and David set with the 1968 Broadway musical Promises Promises but is still pretty good and listenable.


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