Total Recall

Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 film starts with Quaid, a labourer who buys an implanted Mars holiday and hits traces of another life. Everything hangs on one scene. In a hotel room Doctor Edgemar tells Quaid he is still in the chair, all of this bought fiction; Quaid takes the bead of sweat on his forehead as proof and shoots him. Verhoeven signed on for that scene. Treat it as a bluff and the rest is straight action; take it seriously and nothing after is real. It drifted sixteen years and forty drafts before Verhoeven. David Cronenberg wrote twelve, wanting Philip K. Dick while the producers wanted Raiders of the Lost Ark on Mars; he left to make The Fly. Shooting happened at Churubusco in Mexico. Not all the effects were handmade. Kuato was a rig built onto Marshall Bell and worked by fifteen puppeteers; the x-ray scanner skeleton was computer generated, its attempted motion capture too unclear to use and the animation done by hand. The 63rd Academy Awards gave it a special achievement award for visual effects, with no competitive category. A good fit if you accept the reality question hanging on one scene and one bead of sweat. Not for anyone who cannot take the closing decompression shot, Rob Bottin’s heads with eyes that slide out of their sockets.