This movie is better than you think.

Of course, I’m assuming that you don’t think it’s very good. I mean, that’s the assumption I entered the theater with. I went to see ‘Total Recall’ as much because of the air conditioning as the trailers. It’s a remake of a movie that was memorable mostly for its unintentional campiness. Also, it stars Colin ‘the Irish John Stamos’ Farrell, and that is rarely a good sign.

The thing is, with my expectations thus lowered, I came away pretty happy. It’s a pastiche of other science fiction movies you’ve seen, of course. The city of the downtrodden takes its shape from ‘Blade Runner’, the cars borrow heavily from ‘The Fifth Element’, and a sinister army of robots that would fit right in to the landscape of ‘I, Robot’.

That’s mostly ok. It can’t be easy to imagine your own dystopia, after so many movies have plowed that earth.

The thing they get right, or at least much more right than the Arnold version, is making a Philip K. Dick movie. This version of ‘Total Recall’ includes at least passing reference to the existential terror at the center of all the best Dick stories – the horror produced by the realization that your senses are not trustworthy. The sense of reality shifting under one’s feet, the looming psychotic break: these are the heart of the the Dick canon, and I was pleased to see them given some screen time. I mean, it’s not ‘Blade Runner’ or anything, but it’s hot outside.