Conference bookie::movies

    This was based on a Philip K. Dick short story, "We Can Remember It For
    You Wholesale".  I was a big fan of Philip K. Dick, and he used to have
    quite a cult following (some people considered him the best science
    fiction writer of his time.)  Most of his stories and novels focused on
    the idea of being unable to distinguish between reality and illusion. 
    He may have taken a few hallucinogenics during the 60s, which wouldn't
    have hurt as sources of inspiration.

    I felt ambivalent about this film.  While I enjoyed many of its special
    effects, at the same time I was very disappointed that they turned a
    brilliant Philip K. Dick story into an extremely violent Schwarzeneggar
    bloodfest.

    -- Mike

    re. .1 Bloodfest comment
    
    I agree with you. 
    
    My wife and I went and saw this movie several months ago at the
    theatre. It was so violent we walked out of the movie. It seemed liked
    scenes were purposely created to have humans blown away.
    
    Two thumbs down.
    
    Curt

    May too bloody for me too but the whole concept of the story was
    fascinating to me.
    
    I also get a kick out of the movie makers riding on Sharon Stone's
    coat-tails - she did do a wonderful job playing his wife but now all
    the hype is "See Sharon Stone in Total Recall"
    
    One of my favorite Arnie movies,
    Joyce

    A lot of gratuitous violence, not to mention gratuitous slams at
    Big Business and the Laws of Physics (real-time terraforming, indeed!).
    
    But I enjoyed the ambiguous ending and many of the special effects.
    
      John

    
    Maybe on TV the effects were good, but in the theatre, I though they
    were quite sub-par.  The overriding thing I remember about this movie
    is how bad I thought the special effects were, *especially* considering
    all the hype that went into blabbing about the amount of money spent
    making the movie (the $$$ must've all went to Arny).  Hokey sets aka
    Venusville, bad models of Mars landscapes, silly claymation cartoons
    of Martian atmosphere effects, and a bad job of projecting scenery in
    back of characters.  In this day and age, a "special effects" movie
    just should have had better "special effects" in my opinion.
    
    - Sean

    
    
    I enjoyed seeing this again on the tube for nuttin.
    
    The only violence, bloodshed and inhumanity that shocks me is the 6
    o'clock news. It just keeps getting worse.
    
    

    re. -1
    
    i hope i never get "entertainment value" from the kind of bloodshed that
    was in this movie. 
    
    okay, okay its just a movie i know. but like you say, after being 
    depressed by CNN etc every night, I've had enough.
    
    I'll take something uplifting any day over this rot.
    
    Curt

        
    I loved this movie.   The violence didn't bother me at all - it
    was all comic-book violence.
    
    <spoiler>
    
    
    What I liked most about the movie was the ambiguity about whether
    the whole adventure was real or just part of the Rekall experience
    that Arnold had asked for in the first place.  At one point a
    doctor tries to convince him that he is experiencing a Rekall
    experience that had gone bad, and Arnold almost believes him
    until he sees a beed of sweat on the doctor's face.  Could
    Arnold have hallucinated the beed of sweat to avoid having
    to end the experience?   Or maybe the whole episode with the
    doctor been a planned part of the rekall experience.
    
    Even at the end Arnold says "I just had a terrible thought.   What 
    if this was all a dream?"  Then right before the credits roll there
    is a bright light.  Was he waking up?  Was he lost in his madness
    because of a bad rekall experience as the doctor had originally
    suggested while trying to talk him down?  There's no definite answer.
    
    Adam

reply to a bit of the previous spoiler

    
    
    
>    Even at the end Arnold says "I just had a terrible thought.   What 
>    if this was all a dream?"  Then right before the credits roll there
>    is a bright light.  Was he waking up?  Was he lost in his madness
>    because of a bad rekall experience as the doctor had originally
>    suggested while trying to talk him down?  There's no definite answer.
    
Ah well, this totally proves that we got a cut-to-pieces version in the UK...

The violence wasn't over-bad and we certainly didn't get that ending...I kept 
thinking, reading the previous replies, that you lot must have been talking 
about a different movie of the same name that just happened to star Arnie

    If anyone is interested in reading the story on which this movie is
    based, you can find it in volume 2 of "The Collected Stories of Philip
    K. Dick", available in finer bookstores everywhere.  It's the volume
    with the artistic rendering of Arnold S. on the cover.
    
    -- Mike

Or, if you find an older edition (minus Arnold) or some other collection of
Philip K. Dick's short stories, the name of the story is "We Can Remember It
For You Wholesale".

    "We Can Remember It For Your Wholesale" is also the name of Volume two
    of that collection Dick's stories (each volume apparently has the name
    of one of the stories it contains as the volume title; there are
    several volumes in the series.)
    
    I think "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" can also be found in the
    "Science Fiction Hall of Fame", which was first published many years
    ago; I don't know if that book is currently in print.
    
    -- Mike

There are five separate volumes to the Science Fiction Hall of Fame;
vols. 1,3,4 are short stories and vols. 2A and 2B are novellas.  I
can currently locate all of my copies except vol. 1, and none of
those have the story in it.

Regardless of whether or not the story is in it or not, vol. 1
is definitely worthwhile reading, and although I can't remember 
specifically off the top of my head all the stories contained
within it, I remember being fascinated by quite a few of them.

The other four volumes are not quite as good as vol. 1.  They are all
out of print, but the better used book stores usually have at least
one of the volumes hanging around.

Lisa

    The one I had in mind would have been volume 1; that's the copy that I
    had in my possession at one time.  I don't know for certain that it is
    in that volume or not, but for some reason I thought that it was.
    
    -- Mike

    When I first saw this film I was quite happy with the first part of it. 
    But I was so annoyed by the way the post-Rekall plot line became
    progressively more silly, clich�d and unbelievable (and, yes,
    comic-book violent too) that I had no intention of ever watching it
    again.

    However, about three weeks ago I was having dinner with some friends
    who had taken it out on video, so I did end up seeing it again - and
    noticed one little thing that completely changed my mind about the
    film.



                                 **SPOILER!**

    The version of Total Recall I've seen doesn't have the ambiguous ending
    quoted back in .8.  What it *does* have is much sneakier and, IMHO,
    much more clever!

    Anyway, to get to the point: When the film showed Quaid sitting in the
    memory implant machine at Rekall, being prepped to receive the memories
    for the Mars trip he had asked for, a Rekall technician in the
    background of the shot was checking the label on the disc of memories
    they were about to implant and muttered "`Blue Skies on Mars' - that's
    a new one..." (or something very similar, I may not have it exactly
    right).

    Given that that exactly described how the film ended, it was
    immediately obvious that the rest of the film *was* a dream sequence. 
    Even more than that, it must have been the ersatz Martian
    holiday/adventure that Quaid had paid for.  OK, so it was all a "dream"
    - big deal.  How can that make Total Recall into a much better film?

    Well, to begin with it eliminated the main reason why I actively
    disliked it, which was that most of the events in the latter part of
    the film are either impossible to believe or just plain physically
    impossible.  None of that need be a problem for a dream sequence, so
    long as the events are consistent with the explicit (and implicit!)
    parameters for Quaid's Rekall-designed "Martian adventure".

    And that's the beauty of it!  Now that I'm forced to take Rekall and
    Quaid at face value I can see that the "events" in the film fit those
    parameters very cleverly indeed.  But I'm jumping ahead here - what are
    these parameters I'm talking about?

    Explicit:
    Quaid and the Rekall salesman agreed on a Mars package that included
    adventure  and excitement, exotic locations, romance (with a detailed
    specification for the woman) and an overall "espionage / secret agent"
    motif.  As far as I could see everything they agreed on occurred in the
    film exactly as specified, with some extras thrown in for good measure!

    Implicit:
    The things that Quaid asked for are not what you would expect to get
    from a typical vacation.  In fact, they're the sort of escapist fantasy
    you'd normally find only in a lurid spy thriller - and even then it
    wouldn't be happening to some bog-ordinary construction worker on
    holiday.  It requires some major stretching of reality and probability
    to even provide what Quaid asked for, let alone do it in such a way
    that a normal person would accept it at face value.

    Now put yourself in Rekall's position: How do you deliver genuine
    thrills, danger, romance and sex to somebody who *knows* that it's all
    just a fake, a figment of his/her imagination?  I think it's impossible
    - you have to somehow convince the customers that it's all real, and
    then keep them believing it.

    One way would be to start by altering their memories so they don't
    remember ever going to Rekall, but this has a lot of problems:
      - it seems to me that seamlessly replacing memories would be much
        harder than just adding new ones, and would probably be impossible.
      - you'd have to delete a lot of other (possibly very significant)
        events & memories that just happened to be somehow associated with 
        the trip to Rekall.
      - editing memories is dangerous, unethical, bloody well *should* be
        illegal, and needs a very intrusive amount of prior mind-reading to
        be successful. Just the privacy implications alone are horrendous.
      - what do you do when the customers eventually wake up at Rekall
        strapped to a frightening-looking machine, with absolutely no idea of
        where they are or how they got there?

    No, that doesn't seem to be a good idea.  A better alternative is to
    leave their memory of going to Rekall and sitting in the machine to
    take the "trip", but instead of the "trip" give them false memories to
    the effect that they never went through with the Rekall experience yet
    somehow managed to actually make the trip they hadn't been able to
    afford, and had a really wild time, and..... You getting a feeling of
    d�ja-vu around about now?  You should be!


    CONCLUSION:

    Viewed in the above light, even the sillier parts of Total Recall start
    to make perfect sense.

    Rekall gets a customer (Quaid) who wants to experience Mars, basically
    because he's been having bad dreams about having an accident there and
    suffocating.  (Dreams of a clich�d and scientifically inaccurate sort,
    as you'd expect from a jack-hammer jockey with no education in
    science.)  He also wanted a secret agent motif, so why not begin by
    strongly implying to him (and later "proving") that he's actually a
    secret agent from Mars whose real memories have been artificially
    suppressed?  Then the dreams can be explained as his old self starting
    to break through.  Naturally, this means that Rekall will have to
    depict Mars in the same clich�d and inaccurate fashion as in the
    dreams!  Rekall then builds some convenient (and exciting for Quaid)
    sub-plots around the secret agent theme to explain why Quaid went to
    Rekall but wasn't allowed to go through with it (or so it appears to
    Quaid), and how he appears to make his way to "Mars".  Quaid also has a
    gorgeous and apparently loving wife that he is genuinely devoted and
    loyal to, so how can Rekall put in some steamy romance with another
    woman and not have it spoiled by nagging guilt feelings?  Hey, no
    problemo!  Rekall just make it so that he was never *really* married to
    his wife and she never really loved him - in fact, she's one of the
    sadistic "bad guys" and actually tries  to kill him.  Who could feel
    bad about cheating on a woman like that?

    OK, so the general tackiness and ludicrous pseudo-science in the latter
    part of the film is actually a PLUS when you look at it from Quaid's
    point of view - it fits in with his pre-conceptions!  But Rekall still
    has to fit in a pretty unbelievable amount of thrills, spills, narrow
    escapes and general swash-buckleing in a believable (for Quaid!)
    manner.  How do they pull it off without Quaid getting suspicious? 
    Well, they make the action fast and furious so he never really gets a
    chance to think.  They throw in distracting plot twists that leave him
    doubting his own judgement and wondering who he can trust.  At one
    point they even make it appear that the bad guys *want* him to believe
    that everything up to that point has been a dream, thus cunningly
    flattering away any real suspicions by making it seem that he was too
    smart to be "fooled".  They also start off the dream sequence in a
    relatively realistic way, adding the more fantastic elements fairly
    gradually to steadily desensitize Quaid's sense of the absurd.  This
    allows Rekall to work up to a veritable orgasm of macho wish-
    fullfillment at the end, before deliberately planting a seed of doubt
    in Quaid's mind to prepare him as they start to bring him out of the
    dream.  Then, (from .8)

>    Even at the end Arnold says "I just had a terrible thought.   What 
>    if this was all a dream?"  Then right before the credits roll there
>    is a bright light.  Was he waking up?  Was he lost in his madness


    It seems to me that, in Total Recall, the director and script writer(s)
    managed to come up with a film that could simultaneously appeal to both
    your basic Arnie shoot-'em-up fan and the more discerning science
    fiction buff.

    So what do you think?  Was this a slick bit of film-making, or what!?


    	- Bret

    In the original story by Philip K. Dick, the layering of memory
    and reality goes even deeper--go read it!
    
    One of Dick's points is that all we have of the past is our memory;
    even books and objects are only meaningful because we have memories
    of trusting them as evidence.  So if you add false memories to a
    person, you are changing their past and thus their present.  If large
    numbers of people get memory changes, then "reality" gets a bit thin
    (socially constructed reality, not physical reality, that is).
    
    As an example, imagine that 90% of the people in Russia were
    "Rekallized" to believe that the Russian Revolution had never 
    happened, and that the current emperor of Russia was so-and-so.
    Then that person would _be_ the emperor of Russia.
    
    		-John Bishop

    I have read "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale", and I agree with
    you completely.
    
    I wasn't trying to favourably compare Total Recall with WCRIFYW, nor
    imply that TR is true to Dick's story in any meaningful way.  I think
    it would be impossible to accurately translate a complex work like
    WCRIFYW to a visual medium like film.  In all fairness, TR doesn't even
    try - it never claimed to be anything more than "based on" (whatever
    that means) the Dick story.
    
    But I think you missed my point.  The point I attempted to make (not
    very successfully it appears) is that TR is actually remarkably
    plausible and self consistent despite *seeming* to have woefully bad
    science, comic-book plotting and cardboard characterizations.
    
    Was this really the intention of the director and/or scriptwriters, or
    just dumb luck?  I'd like to think it was the former, and I currently
    lean that way.  Others may disagree - and as I asked in my last reply,
    what do all of _you_ think?
    
    		-Bret

    
    More evidence for the "it was a Rekall experience."
    
    When they first put him in the chair, they show him some photos of
    Mars.  Among them is a picture of the Martian air making machine.  When
    it is displayed, the woman is talking about ancient artifacts.  Later
    on when Quade first sees the alien complex, it's *identical* to the
    picture he was shown earlier.  The same thing happens with Milena - He
    is shown a closeup of her face ("sleazy, yet demure") on the monitor
    and then when he first sees her, it's a perfect match.  They were
    showing him things that he would see on his "trip."
    
    If Quade was a secret agent, then that would mean that the whole thing
    was real.  Rekall would not show pictures of an underground complex
    that they claimed didn't exist.  Melina's picture would not be used,
    she was a real person and wasn't employed by Rekall as an "actor".
    
    I vote for it being a dream.
    
    Don
    

    Reviving an old note, but does anyone know what ratio this film was
    shot in? I have a copy on laserdisk in 4:3 ratio, but the new THX
    certified is letterboxed..... Which is the correct format?
    
    Thanks, 
    Dave