TOTAL RECALL

   Film (1990). Carolco. Dir Paul Verhoeven, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rachel Ticotin, Sharon Stone, Michael Ironside, Ronny Cox. Screenplay Ronald Shusett, Dan O'Bannon, Gary Goldman, based on a story by Shusett, O'Bannon, Jon Povill, inspired by "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" (1966) by Philip K. DICK. 113 mins, cut to 109 mins. Colour.

   At a purported $60,000,000 budget this was one of the most expensive films ever made (though TERMINATOR 2 [1991] would cost even more). Verhoeven, whose sf film debut was ROBOCOP (1987), is a deft, intelligent director good at tough action sequences, but with a strong liking for gratuitous violence which, for all its over-the-top comic-book harmlessness here, still has about it a faint whiff of sadism. Exported versions were mostly cut to the requirements of the relevant country's censorship code.Some of the strengths of Dick's original story remain in this tale of a man who, in attempting to purchase false memories of a trip to Mars, uncovers some real ones, and is pitchforked into a heady sequence of exotic adventures, leaving Earth and fighting with rebels against a power-crazed Martian establishment. False memories clash with true ones and, since both look the same on the screen, it is as difficult for the viewer as for the muscle-bound protagonist to tell illusion from reality. TR is entertaining, information-dense and packed with intriguing detail, but has most of the usual faults of big-budget sf sagas: too great a reliance on grotesque special effects (the bugging eyes of victims exposed to vacuum are merely absurd); with-one-bound-Jack-was-free plotting; and in this case a finale of protracted idiocy in which Mars's long-disappeared atmosphere is replaced through vents in a mountain in a matter of minutes. Ideas are "borrowed" eclectically from diverse sources: an air-machinefrom Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's A PRINCESS OF MARS (1917), disfigured MUTANTS from Roger CORMAN's The Haunted Palace (1963), a two-headed mutant from Walter M. MILLER's A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ (1960), archaic alienmachinery from FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956), and so on. It would take a fresh and ignorant viewer to suspend his or her disbelief throughout the film: sf aficionados tend to giggle through the whole of the second half.

   PN

   See also: SCIENTIFIC ERRORS.