There is a moving scene, motivated by Hauser's wanderings in the concrete wilderness, where he enters a room with a Yahama piano and plays the opening Allegretto theme from the finale of Beethoven's Tempest Sonata (#17). The Tempest was used once in the series "Everwood" on WB (as played by prodicy Ephram), a few months after I had suggested its use on a WB message board!
Wednesday, August 08, 2012
"Total Recall": The 1990 concept (with Mars) was much stronger than the remake's
The “remake” of “Total Recall”, this time by Len Wiseman for
Columbia Pictures (Canada), falls short in the area of “conceptualization”. The 1990 film by Paul Verhoeven (for Sony
brand “TriStar”) with Arnold Schwarenegger, provided a virtual and then
possibly “real” trip to Mars, with plenty of desert scenery, an idea appropriate
now given the recent landing of NASA’s Curiosity Rover. Both films are predicated on the science
fiction short story by Philip K. Dick, “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale”.
In the newer post-apocalypse film, most of the Earth has
been made uninhabitable by chemical warfare, and what is left is Britain, and
its labor colony Australia. The two “communities”
are connected by a Jules Verne-like underground bullet subway (as in the
Tribeca film “Metropia” (May 18, 2010).
One problem is that the two communities look too much a like. Both have skyscrapers seeming to float in the
air like Lego toys, with highways, hundreds of feet in the air, above
them. On the ground, London has grown
Asian, but the people live in mid-level cinderblock tenements, reasonably
luxurious (and with plenty of cellular wireless inside) hanging in the
sky. The political climate seems fishy: the Australian colony is about to rebel, so
there is a lot of double-agenting intelligence activity that catches the hero Dennis
Quaid (Colin Farrell), who begins to realize he is a spy after purchasing a “dream
reality” from the company “Rekall”.
There may be more convincing ways that most of the world
could be put out of commission.
Electromagnetic Pulse Attack (EMP) blasts by terrorists are one grim
possibility, and probably more likely than chemical warfare. I’ve written about these threats on my Issues,
Books (July 20) and “Disaster Movies”
blogs (June 15). In one of my own
scripts (“Prescience”), the protagonists are trying to navigate through a
history-layered annular civilization on a “tidally locked” planet, while
knowing that most of Earth, except for Dubai and Singapore, has been knocked
out with EMP by aliens. It struck me
that this kind of idea could work here – put the main story on the M-star
planet.
There is one sequence where the moviegoer gets to see part
of “unreclaimed” London, a wasteland with the air turned orange.
The sequences where Dennis (aka Hauser) gets set up for his
dream therapy are interesting. He is
strapped into an illuminated booth, with various electrodes invading his body
(chest and arms), and is first given some sort of polygraph. They have to know if he is a spy, right?
There is a moving scene, motivated by Hauser's wanderings in the concrete wilderness, where he enters a room with a Yahama piano and plays the opening Allegretto theme from the finale of Beethoven's Tempest Sonata (#17). The Tempest was used once in the series "Everwood" on WB (as played by prodicy Ephram), a few months after I had suggested its use on a WB message board!
There is a moving scene, motivated by Hauser's wanderings in the concrete wilderness, where he enters a room with a Yahama piano and plays the opening Allegretto theme from the finale of Beethoven's Tempest Sonata (#17). The Tempest was used once in the series "Everwood" on WB (as played by prodicy Ephram), a few months after I had suggested its use on a WB message board!
The official site is here.
Kate Beckinsale and Jessica Biel also star, and here is an
interview with Biel:
I recommend two “short films” today. One is Regal Cinema’s own animated
introduction, which shows a light rail transport system at a space station,
rather interesting.
The other is Avi Rubin’s lecture “All Your Devices Can Be
Hacked”, at Ted Talk, reviewed on the “disaster movies” blog Aug. 7.
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