As the 1980s came to an end, what do you think stood as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s most financially successful movie? It would be reasonable to guess The Terminator or Predator or maybe even Commando. But it wouldn’t be correct. No, the biggest-grossing Arnold movie through the end of his initial era of American stardom was the goofy comedy Twins, in which he was paired with Danny DeVito. His successful foray into comic acting was one thing he could claim over Sylvester Stallone. Otherwise, Sly was easily the bigger action star, with both the Rambo and Rocky franchises in play. Predator being a beloved hit certainly helped his cred, but Arnold’s true smash-through as a big-budget was his first movie of the 1990s, one that went deeper into science fiction than that creature feature: Total Recall, which just turned 35 and is now streaming on Paramount+.
It would be correct to describe James Cameron as the director who best understood Schwarzenegger’s talent, screen presence, and broad-audience appeal. He cast him as an unrelenting horror villain in The Terminator, flipped him into a semi-wholesome hero for that movie’s 1991 sequel, and once even successfully directed him to a performance as a human husband, in the uneven but Arnold-essential True Lies. But the evil-twin flipside to Cameron’s unlocking of an Austrian bodybuilder’s weirdly All-American potential is Paul Verhoeven – a director who, like Schwarzenegger, was born in Europe (and unlike Arnold, made a number of movies there) before making his way to Hollywood.
In Verhoeven’s Total Recall, his follow-up to the 1987 hit Robocop, he casts Arnold as everyman Douglas Quaid. Or does he?! Quaid, a construction worker living on Earth in 2084, has dreams of the now-colonized Mars, which lead him to seek out the services of Rekall, a memory-implant service that can give you memories of a vacation you never tool. It’s cheaper than the real thing, and can even include an alternative identity in your synthetic dreams. But Quaid has a bad reaction before the procedure is completed, and Rekall promptly erases the experience from his memory before sending him on his way. Yet this doesn’t completely clear him; his encounter at Rekall seems to have unlocked something in his memory involving a genuine past as a secret agent. Quaid still doesn’t remember his own badassery, but suddenly his wife is shooting at him, goons are after him, and he does seem to retain some muscle memory of how to kill guys with his bear hands. Now is this his real life, or is he living out a Rekall fantasy so real it can’t be discerned? In other words, is he really an Arnold Schwarzenegger character or is this just who he wishes he was?
Though there are some solid twists and answers involving Quaid’s fractured sense of self, any overarching narrative ambiguity between fantasy and reality doesn’t seem to interest Verhoeven that much. More compelling is how the movie brings some notes of convincing vulnerability to the man-of-action Schwarzenegger persona. Quaid (or whoever he is) can kick ass and kill, but can he trust those killer instincts? Is he a man or someone else’s killing machine? It’s a less literal version of what would later inform his Terminator switch, and a fine dilemma for an action hero. “You are what you do. A man is defined by his actions, not his memories,” says Kuato, the mutant leader growing out of another man’s stomach. (The revelation that this is the much-discussed Kuato is like a Cronenbergian twist on the original reveal of Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back.) This doubles as a statement of action-movie acting philosophy.
Total Recall initially has noirish overtones, like a lot of other films adapted from the work of famed sci-fi author Philip K. Dick; an early scene with an attempt on Quaid’s life has noir signatures shadows cast through blinds as a Quaid deals with a possible femme fatale. Or at least, it looks like that subgenre until Quaid flips on the lights and discovers his true assailant is his wife (Sharon Stone) clad in neon workout gear. From there, Total Recall is more on the garish side. Characters, including Quaid, all speak with a kind of cartoon coarseness, and the carnage in Quaid’s wake isn’t exactly bloodless. Is Verhoeven mocking the heartless quips and oft-graceless violence of this era’s previous Arnold movies, the way his Starship Troopers does a sometimes barely-perceptible parody of bad teenage soaps, easy to mistake for the real thing?
As with Troopers, the answer seems like a paradoxically definitive “kinda.” Verhoeven is an expert at having his cake and eating it too. Or perhaps more accurately, he both serves pie and throws it in your face. His American sci-fi movies are exciting, ridiculous, outsized spectacle; they’re also smart, satirical self-deconstructions. He often deals in grotesquerie, and his Total Recall star seems particularly game to stretch himself in those weird new directions; the first shot of Schwarzenegger’s face unobscured by a space helmet has his eyes and tongue swelling almost to bursting in the Mars atmosphere. Later, a device stretches his nose to the limit as it retrieves a tracking device from somewhere in the recesses of his cranium. Schwarzenegger is sometimes described as cartoonish; here, it’s those exaggerations where he feels weirdly down to earth.
Or rather, down to Mars. As unlikely as Mars colonization is, the film’s vision of a populated Red Planet (situated a full half-century after Elon Musk claims to think we’ll start to take up residence there) is still probably more realistic than the impossibly utopian version in certain billionaires’ fevered imaginations. Again Verhoeven’s talent for duality comes into play: Mars as depicted here is entertainingly bustling to experience as part of a sci-fi action movie, and hellish for its on-screen population, mutated by radiation, oppressed by a wealthy monopolizer of resources.
The more satirical dimensions of Total Recall aren’t as full or impressive as equivalent material in Robocop or Starship Troopers, which are both gnarlier and cleverer; it makes sense that Total Recall turned into Verhoeven’s biggest stateside hit (Basic Instinct made just a smidge less, at least in the United States; overseas, it’s still his biggest). And as Philip K. Dick adaptations go, it’s neither as thought-provoking as Blade Runner nor as sincere or affecting as Minority Report. As an Arnold text, though, it’s one of his very best; countless later actioners would attempt to recapture the regular-guy affect he somehow slips in between scenes of action carnage. (When he dispatches someone with a giant drill, his “screw you!” pun isn’t delivered with the dry cool wit of a born action hero; he cries it out in rage.) Verhoeven conveys how strange it must feel, Being Arnold – that uncertainty whether it’s really you that people are responding to you, or some impossible, possibly nonexistent image from their weirdest movie dreams.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.