Oliver retro reviews Total Recall

May 16th, 2012 by Marc 1 Comment

Welcome to Oliver Harper’s Retrospectives & Reviews. Like us all at FTN, Oliver LOVES cinema, and like us, he has passions that not everyone shares, but he feels obligated to put the word out. This week Oliver looks at Judge Dredd… we’ll let him tell you the aims of these videos himself. Over to you, Oliver…

Every week FTN will be hosting videos looking back at classic films from the 80s and early 90s…

“The videos will be a retrospective look back at a particular film covering all sides of the production and discussing how the film turned out. Many people on the net generally like to discuss films with a negative attitude and take joy in bashing films for comedic effect which does work but often many of the reviews aren’t researched well or films are taken out of context for the purpose of making a joke and I feel websites such as youtube have become over-saturated with these types of videos, I wanted to do something different.

Often you come across films with no extras available on the DVD and you want to know more about it, so with some of the upcoming videos I will be discussing films that don’t get the respect they deserve or the ones that aren’t as bad as people think…”

This week’s review is Total Recall

With the upcoming remake to be released in August it’s time to look back at one of Arnie’s best flicks. Based on a short story by Philip K Dick, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, Paul Verhoeven brings in his team from Robocop to bring the book to life and does it with the violence turned up to 11!. Everything in this film from performances to special effects is top notch. The creature designs and make up still look very impressive, it puts CGI to shame!.

What makes this film stand out is its smart script. With the concept of what is reality and what is a dream it leaves you thinking – just like Christopher Nolan’s Inception – is Arnold in a dream or was his whole adventure for real!?

Follow Oliver’s reviews each week here

Tags: arnie, arnold schwarzenegger, oliver harper, paul verhoeven, total recall

Marc

Marc is a self-confessed nerd. Ever since seeing Star Wars for the first time around 1979 he’s been an unapologetic fan of the Wars and still believes, with Clone Wars and now Underworld, we are yet to see the best Star Wars. He’s a dad of two who now doesn’t have the time (or money) to collect the amount of toys, comics, movies and books he once did, much to the relief of his long-suffering wife. In the real world he’s a graphic designer. He started Following the Nerd because he was tired of searching a million sites every day for all the best news that he loves and decided to create one place where you can go to get the whole lot. Secretly he longs to be sitting in the cockpit of his YT-1300 Corellian Transport ship with his co-pilot Chewie, roaming the universe, waiting for his next big adventure, but feels just at home watching cartoons with his kids….

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Luke

I think the remake sucked for the most part.

And I’d like to say that I’m not a nostalgiatard, I saw the original 1990 movie just last Easter and when I watched the new one in the summer, I thought the 1990 was better because it did a MUCH better job in the themes and pacing, not to mention that it balanced entertaining action with a thought-provoking plot. I fell in love with that movie and it’s my absolute favorite “Schwarzenegger movie” and it’s one of my 21 favorite films of all time.

The new one I have to say that it was some pretty entertaining action scenes, impressive CGI but… The sets look like copycats of “Blade Runner” ‘s Los Angeles and the flying car chase stinks of “The Fifth Element”. As a remake it did a pityful job: it didn’t modernized the orginal movie and it even failed to be more faithful to the source material short story (if nothing, it just got even MORE different from the book). The plot is pretty much like the 1990 one, only less intresting-looking, without Mars, with badly flashed-out charcters that come off dull and overall a movie that entertains you, but doesn’t leave you nothing by the end. Unlike the 1990 one, which was full of memorable lines and puzzled you from the beginning to the end. In the remake there’s no puzzling pacing, by the end it’s obvious that Quaid’s adventure was real, there’s nothing that challenges the viewer or impresses him, if not temporally. It’s was a cash-in for teens who’re looking for pretty-looking actors.

But in the very end, the remake wasn’t BAD, I just found it to be forgettable, unoriginal, dull and unimpressive, but I have to say that it’s not as bad as, say, something like the “Conan the Barbarian” remake or “The Haunting”. This wasn’t that great of a remake, but there are MUCH worse remakes out there.

Stick to the original if you ask me.