For my birthday last weekend, my wife and kids took me out to see the new Colin Farrell film Total Recall, a remake of the 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger film of the same name. The movie was pretty cool, there were a lot fun action sequences and the scope of many of the sets did work better on the big screen than they might have on my television at home. Unfortunately, I just kept thinking how much I preferred the original.
So today let’s look at one of my favorite genre characters, Douglas Quaid. (Pictured left, and right)
Quaid (as played by Schwarzenegger) is a construction worker living on Mars (yes - I know he starts on Earth and then goes to Mars but I didn't want to do too many spoilers), or (as played by Colin Farrell) is a factory worker living in Australia (called The Colony in the film). Basically he’s a regular Joe doing a hard days work for little pay and is married to a lovely wife who is subtly stressed by the filmmakers (of both versions) as being a little too good for him.
Quaid wishes his life had more to it, whether that be more excitement, more adventure or honestly, more anything. So he takes advantage of the services of a local company called Rekall, which allows false memories to be transplanted into the mind therefore allowing the user to feel as if he or she had done everything or anything they can dream up.
Then, because it wouldn’t be a good story if everything went well, everything goes wrong.
Both films follow Quaid as he desperately attempts to understand why everyone around him (including his wife) seems to want to kill him and why he suddenly has the ability to kill with his bare hands.
What I love about the character is his journey of self discovery, and although this arc is done well in both films, I prefer the earlier one as the idea seemed fresh at the time and it was set on Mars.
In the new film, Quaid even mentions at one point that it would be nice if he were on Mars and I couldn’t help but lean over to my wife and say “I couldn’t agree more.”
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