If you would have told me in 2010, before I had seen Inception that I would like it less than Total Recall I would have been skeptical. I love Christopher Nolan, Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Michael Caine. This was even before I watched The Prestige, which has become one of my favorite movies. On the other hand, Total Recall has...Arnold Schwarzenegger and it's directed by Paul Verhoeven. Sure, it's based on a Phillip K. Dick story and both Arnie and Paul have done good things, but it seems like no contest. Especially because I'm a pretentious dick.
But as I watched Total Recall I was surprised by the similarities. Both were movies about memories being implanted, both had ambiguous realities and both were action movies with a heady concept. Then, I was surprised by how much more I was enjoying Total Recall.
Here's why:
Honesty: One of the things that bothered me about Inception was that it was an action movie. I was not expecting that, I didn't get that vibe from anything I'd heard about the movie. Now, I like action movies, but it seemed like Christopher Nolan was kind of ashamed about it being an action movie. It's fine when a movie wants to blend genres and do more than one thing, but Inception doesn't seem to want to be an action-thriller. It just wants to be an action movie with a great, interesting concept, which would be awesome. The problem is the action is so muted and uninteresting. Faceless dream people chasing kind of samey heroes isn't very exciting. Especially in a movie about dreams. Maybe Nolan didn't want the action to over-power the gimmick, but it makes for an uneven movie.
Total Recall is an action movie with an interesting concept and it's fine with that. It's super violent, its gory and it tells a heady story that twists and is ambiguous. It's honest about what it wants to be and is more effective because of that. And maybe it's not a plus, but it's possible to go through the movie without ever thinking about the concept. It's there if you want, but if you don't you can enjoy watching people get shot in the head. Inception doesn't really let you just soak in the action elements, so why make an action movie?
Characters: I pay attention to movies, especially when I'm seeing them in the theater. That said, I couldn't tell the characters in Inception apart. I knew who Cobb was, I knew he was the leader. I knew who Ariadne was, because she was an attractive woman. I knew that Ken Watanabe was an older Asian gentleman who was hiring them. And I knew that one of the team was Indian. And that's it. I couldn't tell the rest apart, I didn't know their roles, I didn't care about any of them and I wasn't invested in what they were doing. I like a good anti-hero, a lot of movies are good at making us root for, relate to or just be interested in criminals. Inception didn't do that. They felt as faceless and as empty as the dream people who were chasing them.
I don't really care about the characters in Total Recall. I was never emotionally attached to Quaid or Melina. I was sad when Kuato died, but other than that there's nothing. The movie does differentiate every one of them though. We know a little something about who every one is, they're all given something to do, as shallow as it may be. And I wanted to see how everything turned out and how Quaid would react as he got more information about who he was. Honestly, I probably will soon forget that Quaid's wife was named Lori, but I'll remember what she did and who she was.
Total Recall also goes to the effort of putting some stakes into the plot. If Quaid doesn't succeed the Martian Red Light district will be suffocated. And a corrupt, tyrannical government will continue to rule, but I was mostly hoping that poor little person prostitute stayed alive.
Creativity: Inception is a movie about dreams. So, why do we see a lot of city streets, a hotel and other fairly mundane things? Now, we do see some interesting things, Ariadne's initiation to the dream world, the rotating hallway and the fortress, but that's not enough. It's not that dreams are always off-the-wall bonkers, but they're never as plain as they're presented in Inception. I saw Inception not long after I started to get into movies like Eraserhead and Videodrome. Those are dream-like movies where you don't really know what's going on and they have very strong imagery.
When I kept hearing people talk about what a mindfuck Inception was I thought I was going to see some incredible dream imagery. I also thought the plot would be less straightforward. Inception movies in a perfect line. The only reason people didn't understand what was going on in Inception is because they don't pay attention during movies. The rules are clearly laid out, everything's explained and from there the movie more or less goes according to plan. There are no surprises. As soon as we heard about Limbo, it was obvious we would see it.Every thing is explained. Inception is a pretty plain movie. It's almost like Nolan thought that the movie had a kind of strange concept, so he didn't want to alienate the audience with a lot of surreal imagery.
Total Recall is a movie where a mutant prostitute has three breasts.We see horribly mutated people, strange robotic cabs, exploding heads, tracking devices planted in the brain being removed through the nose and Kuato. It's full of strange sights and even though Mars is colonized by humans it feels like an alien world. It has a kind of ridiculous, over-the-top quality that makes it kind of feel like if what we're seeing isn't reality, it's definitely the kind of thing a company would put together to entertain customers. Quaid literally calls out that the movie is a mindfuck and as on-the-nose as it was, I liked that the movie reveled in its own weirdness.
The technologies at the heart of both movies are very similar. Machines that allow people to go into someone's mind and implant ideas. Nolan makes it a little more complicated with various levels of dreaming and a time disparity between those levels. It's not a common idea, it's not something you see in a lot of movies. But Total Recall, which feels like it should be a less ambitious movie, just goes for broke. It throws so much strangeness at the viewer and doesn't care. Inception doesn't care if the audience isn't following either, but despite the heady concept, it felt like a movie I've seen before. My mind wasn't blown in the way it should have been.
The Ending: Really, the only ambiguity in Inception comes at the very end when Cobb spins his top and we don't get to see if it falls or not. People argue about whether Cobb was stuck in limbo or not, but it doesn't matter because the movie is over. The story's done, the idea they needed to implant was implanted, everyone else is back in reality, what does it matter if Cobb is stuck? He doesn't get to see his children again, which is sad, but, frankly, I don't care enough about the character to be bothered by it. And you know what? Maybe they're better off without their criminal father. This ending surprise doesn't add anything to the movie. It just throws in a little shallow speculation. And this argument could literally be made about every single movie. What gives any ending impact if you just focus on the fact that the movie is over. The difference is that when most movies do an open ending, they leave it a little more open or they do it with a character we care about or they leave us with something greater than a "Yes" or "No" question to think about or they don't wrap everything else in the movie up so neatly. There's a lot of options to make an ending that means something other than that the film is over.
The end of Total Recall is very similar. Earlier in the movie, we hear a Rekall technician mutter something about "blue skies on Mars" as being part of the memory implant. And before that, we hear the salesman pitch the basic plot of the story: go to mars, save the world, get the girl. Exactly what happens. It's pretty likely that Quaid is trapped in his own mind and he's about to be lobotmized, but that's never the focus of the movie and in a way that makes it more interesting. The speculation is put on us to the point where at the end, when Mars gets its blue skies, Quaid wonders aloud if he's in a dream and Melina's response is basically, "Who cares, let's make out." Total Recall's ending is more effective because it adds new perspective to the entire movie. It also realizes that at the ending, it doesn't really matter any more if Quaid is trapped. It's interesting through out the whole movie, but now it's done. You can decide whether the ending is upbeat and hopeful or whether it's dark and a prelude to death. Or you can do neither. And in a way, Total Recall is a deeper movie because it's given you more to think about than just 30 seconds at the end.
I want to make it clear that I don't hate Inception. I was disappointed by it, but it's still a really interesting movie and despite its flaws it's pretty good. I just wanted more from it.
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