Total Recall: We Can Remember It For You Wholesale

The 1990 movie Total Recall starring Arnold Schwarzenegger is adapted from Phil P Dick’s sci-fi story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale.” Although added some dramatic effect into the movie which potentially makes it more appealing to audiences, the film is noticeably inferior compared to the original book. Why the movie is not comparable to the original film lies in both the inherent limitation of motion pictures as a medium and the unwise massive change to the plot by screen story writers.

There is no perfect form of medium. However, Total Recall, being a sci-fi movie, has some serious intrinsic limitations engraved in its bones. The life cycle of a sci-fi movie is significantly shorter than that of a sci-fi novel. Movie presents the world

The Total Recall is more of a western action film than it is a science fiction movie. The movie is made overly dramatic by adding plots and characters didn’t exist in the book. The protagonist of the movie should be an idea, and this idea “must be truly new… and it must be intellectually stimulating (Phil P Dick My Definition of Science Fiction)”. Yet what we see in the movie is dozens of characters – good and evil ones – and hours of fight and violence is added to emphasize the heroism of our main character Quail, and the philosophical questioning of real throughout the book is substituted with cliché Hollywood formula of “A man gets over massive problems and find his true love, incidentally saved the planet”. So, Total Recall lacks both idea and freshness to be a sci-fi while intense gunfight makes it share more similarity with western action film. Not only the movie is too dramatic, the credibility of the movie is substantially lower than that of the original book because of those added plots. The book does not have many scientific or logical errors since it is predominantly the real world with only one tweak. The movie, however, not only makes out a Mars city, but also faked a method to create an atmosphere on Mars. Those scientifically impossible plots and objects will constantly pull audiences out from the movie and realize that all the confliction and drama cannot happen in any circumstances. Their thought process cannot go very deep before they are pulled out again and again by the fakeness of the world building. That’s where all the gunfight and drama comes in handy though, at least audience have something to watch and not think about. If audiences can’t merge in the story when they are watching the movie, it can never be successful. In all, mistakes made during making the movie made it an inferior adaptation of the