A Certain Point Of View posted “Total Douchebag” which is about a Huffington Post’s review of Len Wiseman’s remake of 1990′s “Total Recall.” The reviewer noted the film’s plot shared many similarities with AOTC, while trashing AOTC of course. One commenter to the HP piece noted that the movie seemed to visually cop every sf film of the past several years including AOTC.
Paul McDonald posted about the film on my FB wall. Here’s what he had to say:
Just saw it. You know, this would be a good thing to mention at the PAS. Yes, as A New Hope noted, the guy is bashing it, but this reboot has tons of prequel homages/rip-offs. He missed the one where they actually have commando droids courtesy of the CW, and our hero even rips the chest of one opens and shoots it with a blaster/gun, ala Grievous. Shaky plot and shakier physics, but still a fun movie. I know Len Wiseman is a SW fan, but this is one of the only films I know to directly reference the prequels over and over again. I personally think that’s awesome.
Tags: AOTC, PT references
August 7, 2012 at 7:34 am |
I haven’t seen the new Recall. To me, it seems sacrilegious that you would dare to re-make what is now a Paul Verhoeven classic. After the kind of exploitation-esque absurdity that the 80s take embraces, replete with an Arnold Schwarzenegger in fine accented form, it strikes me that any other kind of take — least of all a po-faced, lugubrious one — would be a horrible reduction: a cash-grab, a gloomy bastion to the horror of mistaking seriousness for profundity, and just a brain-splitting bore. Nevertheless, the idea that the new one references AOTC, of all the prequels, is interesting. A few months ago, I solicited a fresh take on AOTC to the IMDb boards (predictably, it didn’t really go anywhere), arguing that it could be seen as the Star Wars equivalent of “paranoid fiction”, a genre of storytelling that Philip K. Dick, in particular, specialized in (note also AOTC’s numerous references to “Blade Runner” — another PKD story cinematized with a name-change). The wikipedia entry is a tidy read on what that genre entails. In Episode II, there is something unreal about the whole enterprise, and the AOTC plotline runs heavily with the notion that the world is a con-job: an engineered spectacle; an offshoot of Dark Side machinations. So, in a way, things appear to have now come full-circle, with a re-do of a re-do of a story by an author that worked its way into the art of George Lucas, now with the art of George Lucas nestling itself back in that story, in contemporary form. Once more, my mind is aglow with the sensation that AOTC is the most poetic of the prequels, and that it presents the most compelling rendition of there being a a hell in every heaven, a heaven in every hell. Wonderful cinematic art par excellence.
August 7, 2012 at 6:11 pm |
As someone who has fond memories of seeing “Total Recall” in 1990, particularly of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s eye-bulging and his one-liners (“consider that a divorce” or “skruuu yooooo”), I see your point. I have read that this version of the film is closer to Philip K. Dick’s original story for what it’s worth.
August 8, 2012 at 3:03 pm
Somewhere, out in a vast — or maybe not-so-vast warehouse — there is a cardboard box, containing paper files, with a message written on the bottom in black marker ink: “Welcome To Mars!” The boxes were all printed with the storage company’s name/logo: “Recall”. My work colleague and I couldn’t resist cracking TR jokes every day. And we just had to desecrate one of those damn boxes eventually, before the courier came and drove them off to wherever. We were the ones that had to carefully fill every box and label them correctly. We had to have some levity. Looking back, that was a fun job. If the new film more closely follows the original story, that’s cool, but film is also an interpretative medium. It’s cool when filmmakers transform the material and totally put their own stamp on it. And I don’t know why a film that may have been designed to more closely adhere to the original story would re-use the earlier film’s title. Seems like a blatantly commercial decision to me. Camp and zest are underrated in mainstream cinema. But it’s all subjective. AOTC is like the result of a delightful collision between the aesthetics of Scott’s “Blade Runner” and Verhoeven’s “Total Recall”. I have seen the trailer for the new film, but I’m not sure I can stomach so much murk. The same thing deterred me from “Prometheus”. I will probably watch them eventually, though.
August 9, 2012 at 10:55 pm
Prometheus isn’t bad, for what’s it’s worth. It’s not a great movie, but it stands on its own nicely against the previous films and spends a little time on some interesting philosophical points (which it then proceeds to abandon halfway through, much to its detriment). But on the whole it’s okay.
The excellent blog Shabogan Graffiti posted a really interesting analysis on it not too long ago, I think.
September 20, 2012 at 10:59 pm |
I’ve seen the new TOTAL RECALL. Aside from a few differences in setting, motive and characters, it more or less followed the 1990 movie’s plot.
But . . . I don’t consider Veroehoven’s movie a classic. To be honest, I never liked it that much. Granted, it had a lot of style. But the over-the-top violence, the trip to Mars, the mutants and the improbably Schartzenegger/Stone fight . . . just did not win me over. Which is probably why I find the new Wiseman version a lot easier to watch.
As for PROMETHEUS . . . I didn’t care for it one bit.