Critics reviews

Verhoeven wasn't the first to make a fugue state film, one in which everything on screen could conceivably be reality or a hallucination, but Total Recall marked a radical break from the increasingly simplified blockbusters that dominated the 1980s.

Some of the first things about Total Recall I latched onto as a young cinephile were its dazzling production design and special effects, its breathless action sequences, its over-the-top violence—in short, its surface... Today, though, my appreciation for Paul Verhoeven's mind trip goes beyond simple nostalgia, and hinges on how its seductive look and immediate visceral pleasures are wily in their concealment of grand themes.

With the felicitous help of Jost Vacano's characteristically lurid cinematography; Jerry Goldsmith's suggestive soundtrack, which slips oneiric themes between bombastic brass horns and soaring synths; the outrageous make-up effects of Rob Bottin's team; and ingenious location managers... Verhoeven here links underappreciated and everyday moral and philosophical dilemmas of identity and knowledge into a traditional and implausible hero narrative...

Total Recall is, effectively, an incitement to mild class warfare which insists minimum-wage workers deserve more respect, rather than expecting constantly patronizing rhetoric to make their labor more unpleasant than necessary.

While delivering strawberry-jam squibs, Michael Ironside, and a score of unforgettable set pieces, Total Recall mocks precisely the audience wish-fulfillment that a blockbuster entertainment like itself satisfies.

If Verhoeven doesn't seem quite as empowered as he would be later, directing Showgirls or Black Book, Total Recall affords him plenty of opportunities to express his deep affinity for action sequences that have been tempered with naughty movie spectacle, infusing the film with a faint but unmistakable flavor of vinegar.

It effectively does for popcorn cinema what The Fourth Man did for Catholicism. Total Recall proves thoroughly Verhoevenian not despite, but precisely because of its inflated price tag and blockbuster accouterments, its irony and cheekiness burrowing down into the film's DNA—a deeper implant.

I used to rate Conan The Barbarian above all the other works in Arnold Schwarzenegger's oeuvre ("Crom, Grant me revenge! And if you do not listen, then to HELL with you" — good times), but, having watched Total Recall twice over the weekend (for the first time in more than 10 years), I am now certain that it is the actor-auteur's best film... Total Recall is a positively Hitchcockian thriller.

Both [RoboCop and Total Recall] featured state-of-the-art special effects, as befits big budget science-fiction. But compared to the Star Wars films that preceded them, Robocop and Total Recall were breaths of pop-sensibility fresh air, frenetic rather than wooden, with the latter offering as much to chew on as a good Twilight Zone episode. Both had a comic book quality that many other films have reached for since, and few have realized as effectively.

while the movie's steady diet of violence tends to limit some of its narrative options and blunt its visceral edge, it succeeds pretty well in delivering a complicated plot with functional, no-nonsense story telling.