Pinthouse Pizza
On 'Total Recall'
RECEIVED Thu., Aug. 9, 2012
Dear Editor,
I enjoy Marc Savlov's film reviews, but feel he was off the mark, by a half star at least, when it came to his review of Len Wiseman's Total Recall [Film Listings, Aug. 3]. True, the latest adaptation lacks the fun and goofy grotesqueness of Paul Verhoeven's 1990 Total Recall, and Wiseman's take is indeed out of scale with both Philip K. Dick and Verhoeven's stories – but the disproportion isn't due to a failure to address the original story's existentialism, it's because the movie is 90% muscled-up chase scenes.
Neither PKD's short story nor Verhoeven's adaptation were about existentialism. The story is a metaphor of a crisis, but that crisis is midlife, not existential. Total Recall is a fantasy about escape from the drudgery of a menial existence and the boredom of a marriage. It panders to the lament of the aging male: "I could have been so much more." This underlying message is one of the few central elements found in both films and PKD's short story, and its summation isn't the existentialist "life isn't what it seems," but the masculinist "desire is greater than memory." On this central level, Wiseman's adaptation is a sound success, even if it is an action movie only posing as a science-fiction mind-bender. But then, that's what a midlife crisis is: a little vestigial adolescent discontentment pretending to be a major psycho-spiritual awakening. So maybe after all is said and done, Wiseman's take is a near-perfect marriage of form and content.
I enjoy Marc Savlov's film reviews, but feel he was off the mark, by a half star at least, when it came to his review of Len Wiseman's Total Recall [Film Listings, Aug. 3]. True, the latest adaptation lacks the fun and goofy grotesqueness of Paul Verhoeven's 1990 Total Recall, and Wiseman's take is indeed out of scale with both Philip K. Dick and Verhoeven's stories – but the disproportion isn't due to a failure to address the original story's existentialism, it's because the movie is 90% muscled-up chase scenes.
Neither PKD's short story nor Verhoeven's adaptation were about existentialism. The story is a metaphor of a crisis, but that crisis is midlife, not existential. Total Recall is a fantasy about escape from the drudgery of a menial existence and the boredom of a marriage. It panders to the lament of the aging male: "I could have been so much more." This underlying message is one of the few central elements found in both films and PKD's short story, and its summation isn't the existentialist "life isn't what it seems," but the masculinist "desire is greater than memory." On this central level, Wiseman's adaptation is a sound success, even if it is an action movie only posing as a science-fiction mind-bender. But then, that's what a midlife crisis is: a little vestigial adolescent discontentment pretending to be a major psycho-spiritual awakening. So maybe after all is said and done, Wiseman's take is a near-perfect marriage of form and content.
Benjamin Reed