TOTAL RECALL [2012]

MISSED CALL


2012, USA
Len Wiseman
6 // 10




Is diverging from the predecessor a way for the remake? How much of neon lights and rain are acceptable tributes to BLADE RUNNER? Where are all the one-liners gone? There's only one way to find out!

It's only too easy these days to hear about a new reboot/remake project and go 'oh, god, not another one...'. Which I, myself, am only to guilty of too. But seriously, does it have to be automatically a bad thing? Can an idea be revisited and be done better? TOTAL RECALL shows that it can, although sadly, it falls short of achieving it itself. As far as I'm concerned though, the potential was there.

The clever thing to do, was to move away from the original. Doing a shot-by-shot remake is doomed from the word go. Especially when you're up against a behemoth like the original TR with all it's iconic position, prime era Arnie and being so encrusted in nostalgia it could keep the Chernobyl's fourth reactor secure. So Wiseman's TOTAL RECALL does the clever thing indeed and does away with the Mars altogether keeping just the core ideas from both the story and the previous film. This part of the plan works well. By ditching the same setting, Wiseman doesn't give the viewer that much room for running countless (and distracting) comparisons. It's simply much easier to come to this film with a fresh approach and concentrate on what it is, not on how it's different. The 'what it is' part though, that's where problems start.

Oddly enough, I'm sort of OK with the giant lift that runs through the centre of the Earth and gets you from UK to Australia in 17 minutes. The idea is so stupid and outlandish it just slips past the boundaries of probability by such a margin, you simply don't have to worry about it any more. It's like a ghost story. Once you accept the very existence of a ghost, the rest simply follows the rules of a world in which there are ghosts. However, it would help if such a concept was either worked on to a bit finer detail to actually build at least some foundations of plausibility or they should have gone lighter on it altogether, put that tongue in cheek a bit. As we have it, with windows through which you can look at Earth's core while passing through it... well, it's a bit cheap.

Anyway, moving on... The lack of in-depth is the major sin of this film. Both characters and the story are just too two-dimensional to care, really. Even Bryan Cranston and Bill Nighy don't get a chance to do more than just lend their faces. The initial idea of two remaining, isolated communities on Earth is interesting, but very inconsistently executed. There should be much, much more to it than just the straightforward polarity of rich Union and poor Colony. If a majority of the globe would have been wiped of life and unfit for habitation, the repercussions for the remaining communities would have been far, far more profound that the film manages to picture. I also found the existence of an excluded zone right in London a bit surprising and not really corresponding with the general outline of habitable territories from the beginning of the film. To sum it up, it fails quite badly at the script level.

Where it absolutely shines, though, it's the visuals. The visual design of this film I find absolutely stunning. It's cartoonish, it's video game-y, it's fantastically imaginative and it's also pleasingly familiar having drawn from other iconic works like BLADE RUNNER, MINORITY REPORT or dare I say, even THE FIFTH ELEMENT. Especially The Colony has that over the top look that moves closer to a cyberpunk concept art than near future plausibility and I just simply love it. There's not enough artistic extravagance in science fiction cinema and if anything, I'd love to see a film that pushes it even further. For now, I'm happy to admit, just for the eye-candy, I'd consider watching the TOTAL RECALL again at some point.