‘Total Recall’ explained: Was it all just a dream?
The science fiction action movie Total Recall, released in 1990 and directed by Paul Verhoeven, remains one of the most alluring works of the genre. Based on a Philip K. Dick story starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sharon Stone and written by Dan O’Bannon and Gary Oldman, Total Recall is a genuinely mind-bending work entirely in line with Dick’s overall fiction.
At the centre of the film is a fascinating narrative question that poses the possibility of its entirety being a mere dream experienced by protagonist Douglas Quaid (Schwarzenegger) as induced by memory implants. As we venture with Quaid through an action-heavy journey of identity crisis, we too are left to ponder whether what he experiences is indeed real or if it was all part of the imagination.
Construction worker Quaid becomes part of a complex conspiracy surrounding a power corporation, a political rebellion on Mars and his amnesiac past. Agreeing to have false memories of a vacation on Mars as a special agent implanted into his brain by the Rekall company, something goes wrong during the procedure, and Quaid awakens to find he is being hunted down by shadow agents.
Naturally, this leads to the question of whether Quaid is really experiencing such events or if he is merely dreaming them as per the memory implants. Certain signs point to the dream possibility, like the fact that Quaid describes his dream woman, giving the precise details of Melina, who later arrives, suggesting she had been made to his specifications.
Elsewhere, there’s the fact that Rekall’s Dr Edgemar seems to predict the journey that Quaid takes, which would be impossible were he not to be in control of it somewhat. Then, there’s the film’s ending, which refers to an early moment of a technician discussing a “blue sky on Mars”, which is how the credits roll, with Quaid kissing Melina on Mars with a blue sky in the background. A cut to black rather than white also suggests that Quaid is waking up at the end of the film.
However, there are other suggestions that Quaid is indeed experiencing all that happens in the film and that such events are just his repressed memories resurfacing. How could the audience have experienced the perspective of other characters if the film is solely Quaid’s dream, for starters? Then, there’s another moment when Quaid is getting the implant where a technician tells another that he hadn’t actually managed to get them in properly. These kinds of notions put forth the argument that by confronting the realities of his mundane existence and seeing out the Rekall procedure in the first place, Quaid allows his life to become more exciting and experience a new sense of purpose.
While there are indeed pointers throughout the film that suggest the entire thing was just Quaid’s dream and others that indicate otherwise, the fact of the matter is that Paul Verhoeven didn’t want there to be just one possibility, preferring, in fact, to leave both options of dream and reality open – to allow both to be possible at the same time. The director had once explained his creative decision at the Toronto International Film Festival.
“Total Recall doesn’t say whether it’s reality or it is a dream, you know?” Verhoeven stated. “It’s really saying there’s this reality, and there’s that reality, and both exist at the same time. Because you look at Total Recall, there is never a preference, let’s say, taken by me or the scriptwriter, to say this is really what he dreams about, and this is the truth.”
“I wanted it to be that way,” the director added. “Because I felt that it was – if you want to use a very big word – post-modern. I felt that, basically, I should not say, ‘This is true, and this is not true.’ We worked very hard to make both consistent and that both [possibly] true. And I think we succeeded very well. So I think, of course, there is no solution. Hey, it’s both true.”
So there you have it: Total Recall is an ambiguous narrative that allows audiences to make up their own mind as to its reality. By sowing seeds of fictive doubt into his viewers, Verhoeven creates a connection with the film’s protagonist, Quaid, and together, all experience moments of existential anxiety that help to create a taut narrative tension.
How old was Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall?
Paul Verhoeven’s science fiction action film Total Recall was released in 1990, at which point its star actor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was 42 years old, having been born on July 30th, 1947.
The film was Schwarzenegger’s first movie since 1988’s Twins, and he followed up with Kindergarten Cop and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, cementing his position as one of Hollywood’s all-time great action heroes.
How many Total Recall movies are there?
There are two Total Recall movies in, erm, total. The first was released in 1990 based on the Philip K. Dick short story ‘We Can Remember It For You Wholesale’. Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger in the lead role of Douglas Quaid, the film tells of a man in the throes of an identity crisis after undergoing a memory implant procedure.
Over two decades years later, in 2012, Colin Farrell starred in a remake of Paul Verhoeven’s original movie, this time directed by Len Wiseman. While much of the film was indeed the same as the story it was based on, there were a handful of changes to the plot and characters.