Saturday, August 04, 2012

Total Recall (2012)


Total Recall has lot of great visuals including many real sets making their whole world believable. It's non stop action yet I wasn't really engrossed by it. Sometimes the much needed excitement was somehow lacking for me and knowing the gist of the story based on the original film had nothing to do with it.

Even the flying cars sequence which I was most looking forward to, started out great but lost steam eventually. Kate Beckinsale's early fight in the movie is probably the highlight of the movie for me.

Len Wiseman who directed this also directed the first two Underworld films, which I felt were also barely memorable. And my expectations were already pretty low for this movie, so I don't really consider that I was totally disappointed by it.

The streets of the Colony in this movie had a Blade Runner vibe, while some other parts in the movie reminded me of Minority Report. All that only made me realize that no matter how impressive the production design was, the movie still kinda felt hollow and forgettable to me. And neither Collin Farell nor Jessica Biel were the problem as they along with Kate Beckinsale played their roles quite well.

Also as I was watching the movie I kept thinking that there would be other capable directors who would deliver sci-fi masterpieces with such production values. Like Duncan Jones, who could have done his love letter film to Blade Runner which was titled "Mute".

I just hope the remake of Paul Verhoeven's other classic sci-fi film doesn't share the same fate.