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Amazon.com essential video:
This science fiction blockbuster from 1990 began its production life as a very different movie than the one that was released. An adaptation of the Philip K. Dick short story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale," Total Recall was originally conceived of with Richard Dreyfuss starring as a Walter Mitty-like character who experiences a variety of artificially induced fantasies. The movie we know is a mega-budget action epic set on Mars. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a normal working man who discovers that his entire reality has been invented to conceal a plot of planetary domination. Oscar-winning special effects and violent action propel the twisting plot, in which Arnold manipulates his manipulators in a world of dazzling high technology. Director Paul Verhoeven (Robocop) indulges his usual penchant for gratuitous bloodshed, but the movie has enough cleverness to rise above its excesses. --Jeff Shannon

Amazon.com:
This science fiction blockbuster from 1990 began its production life as a very different movie than the one that was released. An adaptation of the Philip K. Dick short story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale," Total Recall was originally conceived of with Richard Dreyfuss starring as a Walter Mitty-like character who experiences a variety of artificially induced fantasies. The movie we know is a mega-budget action epic set on Mars. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a normal working man who discovers that his entire reality has been invented to conceal a plot of planetary domination. Oscar-winning special effects and violent action propel the twisting plot, in which Arnold manipulates his manipulators in a world of dazzling high technology. Director Paul Verhoeven (Robocop) indulges his usual penchant for gratuitous bloodshed, but the movie has enough cleverness to rise above its excesses. --Jeff Shannon

Rating : - So whatever your name is, get ready for a big surprise: YOU are not YOU, You are ME.
Total Recall is certainly imaginative. I've seen it twice now, and I STILL don't understand it. I think you could watch this film a few times, and still have questions that you needed answered. But it plays with your mind, and leaves you racking your brains, wondering if what you just saw actually happened.

In my opinion, this is not Arnie's best movie. Maybe it's the character I'm not sure. And normally I love Arnie in movies. Just didn't get this one. Mind you, I don't often understand films that are based on Philip K Dick stories - does anybody? This is based on 'We'll Remember It For You Wholesale'.

Arnie plays Doug Quaid, a construction worker, who's bored with his uneventful life, but not with his nymphomaniac wife (Sharon Stone). For some reason, he's fascinated by Mars, to the extent of dreaming about it. Dreaming that he's there, with another woman. There's a way he can get a 'vacation' implanted into his memory, and with a bunch of extras - like being a secret agent for example.

Once unconscious, Quaid wakes up in a rage, claiming he's no Quaid, but a man called Hauser. (Anne of Green Gables fans, watch out in these scenes, for a character called Doctor Lull, who was played by Rosemary Dunsmore, who played Katherine Brooke in the Anne Of Green Gables sequel.) But the technicians haven't even begun to implant the vacation yet. Blacking out again, and waking up some time later, he's confused. His once loving wife is out to kill him, as well as his colleagues, and he has some unfinished business on Mars. Despite the fact he's never been there you understand.

It's from here that the film skews into a totally different plot and left me completed puzzled. A later scene involves Doctor Edgemar coming into the so called vacation to tell Quaid/Hauser that he's had a schizoid embolism back in the chair when he was getting the implant. This is quite possibly the point where I definitely started to lose the thread of the film - as well as being confused about whether Quaid was Hauser, or Hauser was Quaid, something happens in this scene (I won't give it away) which completely confused me.

In a way, it's good because it leaves the viewer to decide what actually happens. The viewer can decide whether or not the film is a dream, or a reality, whether Quaid gets lobotomised or not, whether Quaid is Quaid or Hauser etc. But for simple minds like mine, it's left totally bamboozled.

Whereas I did enjoy what I could understand of the movie, the reason I'm giving it a low rating, is because it's simply not my favourite Arnie movie.

The movie transfers well onto blu ray, and some additional scenes (more footage of Mars for example) would have looked amazing in high definition.