It eventually puts him at the heart of the resistance in the mutant-filled Venusville area on Mars, where he finds the girl of his dreams, Melina (Rachel Ticotin), armed and ready. That means Quaid’s journey of self-discovery takes the form of other Schwarzenegger sci-fi/actioners of the period like Predator or The Running Man, with him shooting and punching and bludgeoning his way to the truth. Like a lot of Dick’s short stories, We Can Remember It for You Wholesale retreats into metaphysical space where Quaid’s real and false memories collide, but Verhoeven has a Schwarzenegger movie to make.

It turns out that his current life has been a lie, and it’s going to take an actual trip to Mars for Quaid to unravel this conspiracy and discover who he really is.įrom there, Verhoeven, working from a heavily fussed-over screenplay credited to Ronald Shusett, Dan O’Bannon and Gary Goldman, departs from the text. The procedure goes terribly awry, due to the fact that the Rekall implant clashes with Quaid’s actual memories of being a secret agent on Mars, which nefarious forces have suppressed. Through memory implants, Quaid can order up a two-week trip to Mars that’s as vivid as if he’d gone there himself – and for a few hundred credits more, he can travel as another character, so he chooses “secret agent”.

To scratch this insistent itch, he visits a company called Rekall, which promises interstellar vacations without the risk and expense of boarding a shuttle. Loosely based on the Philip K Dick short story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, Total Recall is about Douglas Quaid (Schwarzenegger), a beefy construction worker in 2084 who lives a modest and happy life with his wife Lori (Sharon Stone), but keeps having vivid dreams of Mars. But his career in Hollywood, for as long as it lasted, was often about getting away with something. Now that the future Verhoeven predicted has come to pass – in corporate and militarized law enforcement, in the propaganda used to sell the public on pointless and endless war – his intent seems more obvious.

Verhoeven’s talent for delivering the hard-R goods has always given him the latitude to slip more subversive sentiments into his work, and even the overt satire of RoboCop and Starship Troopers was often ignored or misunderstood during their original run. From a distance of 30 years, it’s now possible to look at Total Recall as the middle part of an unofficial sci-fi/action trilogy about authoritarian governance, bookended by RoboCop and Starship Troopers, but it didn’t seem that political at the time.

Total recall cab driver