I Saw Total Recall Theatrically

and it was awesome. I reviewed it here twice before (here and here) before but here's the new one I posted on Letterboxd earlier in the day: 

Getting my ass to Mars and seeing this theatrically: awesome.

Cinemas in the United States are still not doing too well... in fact, I was the only person in attendance at this screening and I felt bad for the cineplex I was at-although for me, being there alone was fine. Fathom Events presented this and as I have thought the movie awesome for a number of years, why not see it on the big screen? In essence it was done as an advertisement for the movie being released on UHD in two months time; it did look really nice even on a 2K projector.

My opinion has not changed during all this time. It's still a blast seeing those practical futuristic worlds and Arnold in a wild R-rated big-budget adventure which has some Arnold trademarks but is for certain smarter than a typical Schwarzenegger adventure. What is real and what is a dream is left up to the viewer and no matter what you think is “correct”, the movie still works. It doesn't even really matter if everything that happened to Quaid after he got those memory implants at Recall was “real” or part of the fantasy he paid for or even some off the wall theory... it's easy to root for Arnold as he fights against corporate A-holes and tries to liberate the marginalized people on The Red Planet.

I am glad the movie is still incredibly effective 30 years later; of course, theatrically some of the optical effects were more noticeable, but that was no issue for me. Before the film, they played a brief featurette where Verhoeven gave some basic details, like how he and Arnold met with each other over dinner and that's all it took for this long in gestation project to finally come into fruition. Looking at Wikipedia, none other than Cronenberg was attached in the past, only to leave it due to “creative differences”. In what is really not a surprise, he was the one who came up with the mutant Martian angle. For comedy's sake, I'll presume he also had the idea for the lady w/ three breasts!

On a real life absurd note, remember a few years ago how there was a woman in Florida who claimed she had plastic surgery to add an additional boob, only for it later to be proven that like in Total Recall, it was a prosthetic chest? Who knows what it says about me or Florida but I knew more than one person that knew her personally! No, I never met her... nor would I want to meet someone that appears to be a trainwreck.