For my money Total Recall is the best Philip K Dick adaptation.
No doubt Blade Runner is a much better movie.
But Total Recall FEELS like reading a PKD novel. Everything is artificial. Hyperreal. Claustrophobic.
Paranoid.
At least when it’s not busy adding to the body count.
On my recent rewatch for The Verhoeven Paradox the action and violence were by far the least interesting part.
But Paul Verhoeven has always known what audiences want. And he gives it to us.
But every Verhoeven movie has a chewy subtext to balance the mega-violence and make audiences think.
In Total Recall it’s the classic theme that PKD came back to again and again.
“What is real?”
Damien Walter 