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Total Recall (1990) More at IMDbPro »

The book is very serious and the film is an entertaining action Arnie movie. What's surprising about "We Can Remember it for You Wholesale" is how close it is to Total Recall at least, up to a point. Both the story and the movie follow Douglas Quaid, an everyday guy in a loveless marriage who is inexplicably drawn to Mars. Realizing that he'll never be able to go to the planet in person, Quaid visits the offices of Rekall, Incorporated (traveling there and back in a taxi driven by a robot as in the film), where he elects to undergo a process that will insert the memories of a trip to Mars into his brain a trip where he adopts the role of a secret agent. Trouble is, before the process can even begin, Rekall's technicians discover that those memories already exist in Quaid's mind: he is a secret agent, and he did go to Mars. Having now remembered his other life, Quaid finds himself pursued by shadowy security forces intent on killing him.

Where the short story and the movie part ways is directly after this point. In the film, Quaid/Arnie heads off to Mars and gets involved in a Martian revolution. All of that was bolted on to Dick's story by Verhoeven and his writers, Dan O'Bannon et al; Dick's tale ends with Quaid returning to Rekall voluntarily to avoid being killed, there to have another, more outlandish memory implanted to override the secret agent/Mars one leading to a nice twist that's even more insane than what's gone before. But although the story and the movie diverge here, prior to this juncture they run along remarkably similar lines right down to those robot taxis.

Dr. Edgemar shows up at Doug's hotel room, and even brings along Doug's wife in order to convince Doug that he's not actually on Mars, but at Rekall. Edgemar says that Doug is suffering a paranoid delusion based around his memory implant. Edgemar brings several valid arguments to Doug's attention, such as the fact that Doug lived a normal life all the way up until he went to Rekall. After that he has people trying to kill him left, right and centre, yet Doug himself is more or less invincible (as nobody manages to kill him). He then happens to get to Mars and meets an athletic brunette who is both sleazy and demure (exactly the woman Doug described at Rekall as being his preference) and so on. Doug, bordering on being convinced, tries one last time to call Edgemar's bluff and suggests that he could kill Edgemar and it won't matter because he isn't really there. Edgemar responds by saying that it won't make any difference to himself, but to Doug, Edgemar would be dead in the dream world, and with nobody to help guide Doug back to reality, Doug would slip into permanent psychosis, ending with him being lobotomized. Edgemar convinces Doug that this is true and Doug puts a pill in his mouth (a symbol that he desires to go back to reality) and as Edgemar orders Doug to swallow the pill, Doug sees a single bead of sweat trickle down the side of Edgemar's head. So Doug took this as a sign that Edgemar was indeed lying: a memory implant would have no reason to sweat. The Edgemar standing there is therefore real, and getting nervous due to Doug threatening him with a gun, and also afraid that Doug wouldn't break. So Doug shoots Edgemar in the forehead and spits the pill out.

Assuming that Doug is not spending the majority of the movie dreaming in a chair at Recall, but everything he experiences is really happening, the proposed series of events could be as follows:

Vilos Cohaagen is administrator on Mars, Hauser is his trusted friend and employee. During the colonization of Mars, Cohaagen has sacrificed many workers by letting them work to death, and allowing others to mutate into hideous forms, due to poor shielding from space radiation and bad air quality. Cohaagen further extorts Mars' inhabitants with high taxes on air, threatening to shut off the air to those who oppose him. This causes a resistance group of Martians (colonists and mutants) to start terrorist actions against Cohaagen's forces, in order to free Mars from his oppression.

During mining operations in the Pyramid mountains, workers discover remnants of an ancient alien civilization. Its purpose was perhaps to make Mars an habitable planet with its own atmosphere; however, that would effectively take away Cohaagen's source of power, so he closes the mine and keeps the finding a secret, maintaining that the alien machinery was there to cause a global meltdown and destroy Mars if it was ever turned on (or he likes to believe that, at least). The resistance leader, Kuato, learns about the secret, and that it may be the key to the salvation of the planet, so he desperately seeks the truth.

Several attempts are made to eradicate the resistance, but the rebels are well hidden among the inhabitants of Mars; infiltration missions fail because many of the mutants are psychic and spot the spies eventually before they can find out who and where Kuato is. So Cohaagen and Hauser set up a delicate plan. Hauser starts spying on a woman called Milena, who is suspected of working with the rebels. He gains her trust by convincing her he wants to get out of Cohaagen's organisation. Just when he is ready to be introduced into the resistance, Hauser pulls out and 'disappears' to make the rebels and Milena think he has been caught and killed by Cohaagen. A trail is set for 'Douglas Quaid' to find his way into the heart of the resistance. Hauser tapes a video to himself, explaining how he wanted to betray Cohaagen, and that Quaid needs to go to Mars to join the rebels. He also makes another tape, one to be revealed to Quaid after Kuato has been killed. A suite in the Hilton Hotel on Mars is rented in Houser's name, and a message is left there with instructions to find Milena. Hauser's memory is isolated and blocked, a bug is inserted in his head and he gets the memory and personality of Douglas Quaid, a construction worker on Earth. One of Cohaagen's spies, Lori, goes to live with him pretending she is his wife, making sure that he remembers nothing of his former life. Other people keeping an eye on Quaid are Harry, who impersonates a colleague on his work, and Richter. None of them, however, are told that Hauser is actually a double agent; they simply believe Hauser is a traitor who got punished by having to live out his days on Earth as Quaid.

The object is to have Quaid return to Mars after a while so he can get into contact with Milena and the resistance again. Unfortunately, this plan gets accelerated when Quaid unexpectedly begins to have dreams of his former life on Mars as Hauser. He is so fascinated by these dreams that he goes to Rekall to have a trip to Mars implanted. However, during the implantation procedure, the scientists inadvertently reactivate Hauser's memory. They wipe it and restore Quaid's personality again, but Harry, Lori and Richter fear that the procedure at Rekall will cause Hauser to resurface again, so they try to kill him, despite Cohaagen's orders to bring Quaid back alive. Cohaagen has another agent deliver a suitcase to Quaid, containing the first Hauser message, the bug extractor, and enough information to get to the Hilton Hotel on Mars and find the message to look for Milena. On Mars, Benny, another one of Cohaagen's spies, helps Quaid to get where he needs to be. But Milena does not believe Quaid's story and sends him away. Benny relays this information to Cohaagen, who calls in Dr. Edgemar from Rekall to present himself to Quaid as a memory implant, in an attempt to fool Quaid into handing himself over with Lori's help. It is not quite sure why they want Quaid back now; perhaps they want to reacquire him and try another way to get him to Kuato, now that Milena seems unlikely to be of any help. Despite that Quaid sees through Edgemar's ruse, Richter's men succeed in catching him. He is unexpectedly rescued by Milena, and from there, Quaid fulfills his purpose of meeting Kuato and getting Benny close enough to kill him. Afterwards, Quaid learns from Hausers message how he has been used. The big flaw in this plan was obviously that 'Quaid', the new personality, could not be adequately controlled and defended his own existence, leading to him activating the alien device, and the bad guy becoming the hero.

For this explanation to work, some coincidences need to be accepted; for example, Bob from Rekall, Dr. Lull , the Rekall technician and Dr. Edgemar give a lot of examples of what will happen in the dream, which actually happen later on. (It should be noted that in the audio commentary, Verhoeven correctly states that the quality of the script is exemplified by the fact that two characters can accurately predict the direction the story will go in, yet the film retains its edge-of-the-seat feel.)

This is the other possibility, and the facts also fit this explanation. The assumption is that Doug starts dreaming during the procedure at Rekall, and everything that happens before that is reality. Doug simply has dreams about Mars, because he sees daily news footage of the guerrilla war going on there, and that's why he unconsciously incorporates it into his nightmares. Dreaming about another woman may simply be coincidence; we all dream about anonymous people, she may simply be someone he once crossed on the street or met in a store, and not a recollection of an earlier memory. A subtle clue that Doug's later adventure will be a dream might be that Bob, the salesman from Rekall, seems to be hesitant to let Doug make a virtual trip to Mars. Maybe because the daily news keeps showing how violent the situation on Mars is, and he fears that this knowledge may negatively affect Doug's dream. Which is exactly what happens with Doug and what causes his dream to run out of control. Aside from that, Bob tells him how the dream will go; Doug being a secret agent, people firing guns at him, the suite at the Hilton, and at the end killing the bad guy, rescuing the girl and saving Mars. Dr. Lull mentions alien machinery, and the Rekall technician comments that Doug's dream is called Blue Skies on Mars. It is very conspicuous that all of this happens in the rest of the movie if it wasn't a dream.

So the dream starts exactly when Doug is sedated in the chair at Rekall. The part where he wakes up, thinks he is Hauser and attacks the Rekall employees is the beginning of the dream. As Dr. Edgemar later confirms, Doug is making the dream up as he goes, incorporating things and people he knows into the dream; this includes the procedure at Rekall, his wife Lori, Harry from work, Vilos Cohaagen, the Mars rebellion, and Milena from his dreams. People and things he doesn't know, like Richter and Benny, may be part of the original Ego Trip dream program. Due to the schizoid embolism however, Doug experiences extreme paranoia, thinking that he is a double agent whose memory has been erased, and who is hunted by almost everyone. Dr. Edgemar needs to intervene: he inserts a memory of himself in the dream and tries to convince Doug everything is the result of his imagination running wild; he even implants an image of Lori (the real one) to assure him. As happened in the Rekall office, Edgemar gives an outline of everything that is about to happen; saving the rebel cause, being Cohaagens bosom buddy, and the alien civilizations. Doug believes it for a minute, but then he sees Edgemar sweating. Now it can be speculated that Doug is so paranoid that he imagines the drop of sweat on Edgemar's head, practically giving himself a reason not to believe the doctor, and kill him. This is probably what Edgemar meant when he said that the "walls of reality" would come crashing down and Doug would be stuck in a permanent psychosis; Edgemar was Doug's only connection to reality, and by killing his only guide out, Doug ultimately rejects the real world and accepts the dream as reality, becoming permanently stuck inside an illusion. In this illusion, Lori immediately becomes a paranoid imagination again, attacking him and betraying him to Richter's men. Doug plays out his dream, and in the end, the only way to get him back to the real world is by lobotomizing him, which is what happens when we see the flash of light.

The film was edited by the filmakers to get an R rating although it is unknown whether this footage exists anymore, taken from the alternate versions section:

Benny's death is optically cropped to remove the exiting drill erupting from his stomach.

The innocent bystander used as a shield was bloodier before trimming.

The stabbing of Helm in the bar had the bowie knife slicing up his stomach. Stills of this were actually featured in Fangoria magazine at the time of the film's release.

Several shots of the scientists being killed by Quaid after he breaks free from the implant-machine were shortened.

The scene of Richter's arms being severed was shortened.

During the late 1990s, Jonathan Frakes was set to direct a sequel for Dimension Pictures but the budget eventually became too big. Although Arnold Schwarzenegger had not officially been signed on, Frakes did say he would make the film with or without him.

When asked at a UK convention in 2006 about any existing possibility that the sequel could still be made, Frakes optimistically replied, "maybe someday(!)".

Frakes also agreed that one theory was that Minority Report (2001) was a sequel of sorts in that it was set in the same universe as Total Recall (1990) and that the three Cognatives (from Minority Report) were in fact psychic mutants from Mars.

In 1999, there was a television series named Total Recall 2070 was ment to be set in the same universe as Total Recall; however, the show had far more similarities with the Blade Runner movie (also inspired by a Philip K. Dick story) than Verhoeven's film. The two-hour series pilot, released in VHS and DVD for the North American market, borrowed footage from the film, such as the space cruiser arriving on Mars.

There will be a Remake not a sequal starring Colin Farrel as Quaid in the summer of 2012 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1386703/