Total Recall, Total Dud

Dudley Done Wrong

Total Recall 2070. Directed by Art Monterastelli, performances by Michael Easton, Karl Pruner, and      Cynthia Preston, Alliance Atlantis, 1999

Stylized and cribbed from Blade Runner down to the Asian style among the denizens of an unnamed city, a synth-pop knock-off of Vangelis and a purposeless "Gaff" (James Edward Olmos) clone, Total Recall 2070 also steals the basic plot of a most excellent movie. This is not that movie.

In this movie, self-aware androids want more time to -- have memories -- and thus snatch a Rekall Corp. scientist but are thwarted by our hero, David "I Kid You Not" Hume (Michael Easton) who must have been a stunt double for David Duchovny at some point in his career. The androids are sneaky and end up grabbing the Mars-bound scientist in order to hold onto their precious yet fake memories and feelings.

Meanwhile a youngster who is a mind-reader (this is the future and radiation does great things in the future) and most excellent video game player is kidnapped from two distraught foreigners with the surname of Bimboo or Sordoo or Sodoor or somesuch. This sad couple mistakenly thought they went for a nice trip to the Galapagos Islands but really had a mind-job done on them by Rekall (or someone pretending to be a Rekall rep) and had their kid snatched along with any memory of even ever having a kid. What a nasty corporation!

No new ground is covered in the pilot but there are no less than three zingers that will give viewers a chuckle and/or a deep sigh:

1. After our protagonist, good cop, Officer Hume loses his partner in a gun-battle with androids, he gets a new partner with the personality of Lieutenant Commander Data from Star Trek the Next Generation but has no clue that this cop is - gasp! - an android. I'm a complete space cadet and it was clear to me from the first scene with Mr. Roboto and his "Caesar" haircut that this was a tin man. Remember, Hume's whole professional life revolves around paying attention to what's going on.

2. Much ado is made of the lethality of a 12mm pistol that Officer Hume has snatched from the scene of his partner's murder, but when he deploys the weapon he is (a) unable to hit the back side of a barn with it, and (b) when he randomly does hit his target, the victim dies no more surely or not than the bodies that seem to fall everywhere from ray guns in the hands of most everyone. 

3. Hume's highly principled and loyal wife, Olivia, is often on the verge of getting really, really mad with David but she always falls back and melts in his arms, and supports all of his crazy antics in the end such as going to Mars with his robotic Lurch-like partner.

This one was bad. Unfortunately is was not bad enough to be bad like Sharknado. I give it two out of five velotaxis. 

Plots for and against America

Topical Review

Roth, Philip. The Plot Against America. Vintage International, 2004.

Roth's novel demonstrates the resiliency of the American republic and the inherent decency of "average" Americans, Gentile and Jew alike. It also raises troubling questions for what "best for America" means on the global stage. This tension between pragmatism and ideals is shot through the novel but it is also found in the appended 9/11 (1941!) speech by Charles Lindbergh to an a gathering of America-Firsters. Lindbergh notes that the push for war is backed by three groups: "the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration" (Roth 386).  

At the level of facticity, Lindbergh's claim was certainly true: all three favored military action by the U.S. against the fascists. But it also true that it was deeply naive to think that the USA could be a kind of super-Switzerland that could avoid worldly entanglements outside our borders and shores.

Were the world compartmentalizable to the degree that the America-Firsters envisioned, Lindbergh's splendid isolation could make some sense (political, if not moral). But here Lindbergh suffered from a kind of temporary blindness: his underestimation of the totalitarian threat and its voracious appetite. It is now unimaginable to think that the Axis Powers would have simply stopped at a certain point and "left well enough alone." But Lindbergh's blindness was temporary: after the attack on Pearl Harbor he fully supported the war effort and actively trained pilots and personally participated in combat operations in the South Pacific.

When push came to shove, we could all be Americans: Jew and Gentile, Democrat and Republican, Catholic and Protestant. Yet it is by a slender thread that we have remained one. "Could," not "always will." There is no guarantee in the future that our better angels will succeed. Roth's book illustrates this truth in ways winsome and evocative.