Total Recall is a 2012 remake of the 1990 original about a man who begins to suspect that he is a spy after visiting a company that provides its clients with implanted fake memories of a life they would like to have led.
Take a look at this picture:
I love this shot. Seriously. When I first saw director Len Wiseman‘s remake, I was immediately taken by this image and the surrounding sequence. Out of context, it might not really make too much sense but even so, I’m pretty sure one hundred percent of you get what’s happening – There’s a guy … and he’s being chased. While critics pounced on this movie, most unfairly I believe, I think many overlooked what a gorgeous bit of production design and excellent direction the film has, and this rooftop chase is a superb example of why.
That ‘guy’ in the picture is Douglas Quad (Colin Farrell) and he’s having a really bad day. He’s just come from a place called Rekall, a virtual entertainment company that implants artificial memories into paying costumers looking to have fantasies come to life. Douglas opts for a secret agent adventure, but before the process can be completed, the administrator/salesman of the fantasy finds in his records that he actually already is a secret agent, just as a phalanx of police armed with machine guns burst into the room and start firing.
Amazingly, Quad finds within himself some extraordinary skills and takes out the whole squad of officers and races back home to his wife Lori (Kate Beckinsale), only to find that, after telling her what happened, she’s on their side and tries to murder him. Turns out she’s a spy herself, ordered earlier to pretend to be his spouse, and now on mission to see him dead. He barely manages to escape the house with her right on his heels, and thus begins one of the best moments in the film, an extended flight through the rooftops and apartments of this dystopian future that mixes a bit of Blade Runner aesthetics with themes from the original Arnold Schwarzenegger classic.
At their home, a small space in a sort of shuffled Jenga block of concrete apartments stitched together along the rainy side streets of a crowded city in The Colony, the new name for the continent of Australia, Quad spills his unbelievable tale of violence to Lori, who initially warms to him, even giving him an embrace, though this quickly turns to strangulation, and in a matter of seconds, Douglas has a new threat to contend with, the woman he loves. They go hand-to-hand about the room, trading blows until he finally relents and smashes through a window and down to the balcony of the tenants below. She follows out the door, firing shots into the night and the chase in on.
Wiseman (who directed Beckinsale in two of the Underworld films) uses this opportunity to travel his camera about the cityscape, the elevation of the action lending a great deal of tension to the foot chase. Perhaps drawing a bit from the Wachowski‘s The Matrix and its now iconic action opener, with Total Recall, Wiseman expands on the premise and has his characters weave their way through a series of cascading drops, one building to the next as they make their way to ground level, and what I like best about it is its style. Wiseman manages to keep both Quad and Lori in most of the shots and cleverly uses space and light to direct our eyes always to them, even as the screen is packed with detail. For instance, look at this screenshot (click it to see it larger):
This is early in the chase. While it seems like a cluttered collection of mixed architecture and cultural identity, in motion it’s a stirring multi-layered set where cutting from the top left to the bottom right we see a row of raised apartments looming high over the streets. Coming from the right top is a glass-covered train about to bi-sect the image and if you look closely, you can see Quad and Lori, she about to jump from the red sign to the yellow one and he a platform lower in white light. The scale is stunning and we get a terrific sense of depth and height, the camera panning with actors giving it even greater momentum.
The action just picks up from there, the two like cannonballs bursting through windows and doors, Lori relentless in her pursuit. At a skylight, she seems to corner him under a dinning room table below, shooting at him in a bit reminiscent of Die Hard, before he slips past and out once again into the rain, where we then get that magnificent shot from the start of the post. Here it is again:
This is where I really felt I knew what Wiseman was doing and became fully hooked in the film, not so much for the story, as it mirrors much of the first one with some nice twists, but because I couldn’t get enough of its style. Many reduced the film down to bland comparisons, faulting the film for lack of originality, which is a dead end for an argument since sticking to the same plot would garner the same criticism as veering too far from it. This isn’t nearly as empty or devoid of character as some attribute, many I feel overdosing on nostalgia, leaving the rose-colored past far shinier than it deserves. If this movie had not been so tethered to a classic, it might have earned much higher praise, of which I’m not going to shy away from. This Total Recall is robust and stacked with great action and a great performance from Farrell who I believe sells the character better than Schwarzenegger (who, don’t get me wrong was great fun). Farrell is much more convincing as an every-man and his arc therefore all the more identifiable.
Watch Total Recall (again) and get lost in the visuals and action, Wiseman clearly a filmmaker who knows how to propel a story more through set pieces than dialogue, but pay most attention to this outstanding chase from top to bottom, a thrilling, breathtaking sequence that I think will get you on board if you appreciate it for its technical and visual artistry.