Total Recall (1990) ✦ Full-Length Watchalong Reaction
Added 2025-08-25 01:00:08 +0000 UTCThis was the winner of the Sci-Fi Dystopia Vibes poll. Thanks again for voting!
A heckin' good time and very Black Mirror feeling too. Looking forward to your comments! Thanks for watching. [Direct link here.]
✦ KL
Comments
Have you seen the trailer for the new Running Man, Brett? Looks like a blast.
Tyler Foster
2025-08-26 03:28:18 +0000 UTCImagining the future is near impossible... Pepsi, sure, but Fuji Film? (No idea digital imaging would erase film.) Mars Today newspaper? (No idea of the internet becoming the daily/hourly news source.) No decent reason why the "aliens" never turned on the air making machine. Cohaagen's reason is disproven when the machine works. Action film is less than the Phil Dick story, which leaves the ending even more ambiguous.
Cliff Adams
2025-08-26 03:21:28 +0000 UTCSo after confusing Running Man with Total Recall, just watched ths movie again. It's been a while so I did enjoy the rewatch. I also like to see whether the filmakers predictions about future tech are correct or not. I think modern phones have basically supplanted most of the technology....Sharon Stone (sighs deeeply), damn i had crush in the day. She's an underated actress (and still looks fine). Her best was in a film called Scissors....Arnie did was Arnie still does - owns the screen. ....I found myself thinking about a few films that followed Total Recall. There were touches of The Bourne identity, Inception (dream within a dream & Mr Charles) , and the Star Wars movies with the holograms , deception and cheating death....The film did make me think about the role of cyber security in tech, and then films like Companion. So oddly enough, not unlike Running man, much is relevent today. I think both films suggest the absurd - which in my own opinion is ironic given the absurdity of AI, its consequences and our reckless endevours to control it.
Brett John Chase
2025-08-26 00:16:47 +0000 UTCPredestination (2014) or Primer (2004) are more mind bending (time travel) movies I think you'll enjoy. This movie kinda glosses over the whole world war on earth and the Northern Block's need for the mineral to fight, this is why he can get away with it. I bet it really is just a dream. He got what he wanted either way. I would definitely not do the whole Rekall thing for a vacation. Trauma memories intruding on the present are bad enough but losing your sense of what really happened vs what was implanted seems like a gamble that would not end well for anyone. Do people use this tech to learn trades or to be proficient in a task? Can you replace actual experience with implanted memories. I think not. "Muscle memory" I think can't be implanted and learning to play tennis (like in the movie) needs the actual physical training. Even flying a helicopter (The Matrix) needs some tactile experience of how far or how it feels to hold the stick. Imagine having the memory of completing a task and then irl trying to do the same thing and failing. Now turn that into something like skydiving, sailing, or flying a helicopter. When you fail at those because you had false memories of learning to do them and not actually building the physical strength, subtle feel, or actual experience in responding to weather conditions... I think you see my point. Definitely Starship Troopers is a must watch. It is great that some of these books by excellent authors were made into movies. It is too bad that some of them didn't do so well in the 2000s. Christopher Stasheff, Isaac Asimov, Phillip K. Dick, Robert A. Heinlein are all authors i was introduced to in the 80s and we got a whole bunch of fun movie/tv adaptations for their works. I think we are lucky that great sci-fi is still being adapted for us to enjoy.
Christian Rennie
2025-08-25 22:25:50 +0000 UTC
