Film Discussion of the Week: Total Recall

Total Recall rules. It stars Arnold, so its already awesome. It has a woman with three breasts that are nude and exposed. Its extremely violent and lots of people die, which rules. A 5/5. 

I agree, I love the original, but the remake is no good. Total Recall is an instant classic.

The forum is glitching for me, sometimes I see other users' avatars on top of other users' posts, and then it fixes it. It's weird.

Balder - I knew it was an adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story, but I didn't know Dan O'Bannon was also among the writers.

It is such a great movie. It's in the same category as Robocop, being a somewhat sleazy action movie with characters and scenes that would fit well in a b-movie but with high production values and great effects, all while having a genuinely interesting and thought-provoking story.

I don't know why the hell they tried to remake both movies. They were very much products of 80s cinema, when high budget action movies still dared to be sleazy, ugly and violent. High budget films nowadays are too pasteurized to be like those.

I like the original but I enjoyed the reboot more.

I love how Armored Core Raven always brings the most unexpected point of view! Mate, I really want to read why you prefer the remake over the original.

I didn't grow up with the original, I watched it for the first time less than a decade ago and it was with no nostalgia glasses or prior preferences, it's cheesy, campy and hasn't aged well, it's silly, very low budget 80s sci-fi, I still give it a (weak) 4/5 and can enjoy it for what it is, but it's not a movie I think of as a high ranking favorite, I definitely wouldn't put it anywhere near the level of flawless classics like RoboCop which is, purely objectively speaking, one of the most perfect and timeless movies ever made, and in the Total Recall reboot's defense I thought it was easier to follow, both in story and pacing, doing a much better job setting up the story and characters, I especially like how they handle certain characters compared to the original and the sci-fi stuff is a lot more futuristic in the kind of ways that are far more appealing to me than anything was in the old one, it's a very easy win for the reboot in this case, the original doesn't hold up and it's only really enjoyable as a cheesy 80s chuckle flick, it's a fun romp in that regard but taking that movie seriously is something I can not do, Ahnuld is like a caricature of himself and the other characters don't fare any better and everything has a cheap and uninspired look to it, like the three boobed mutant hooker, that looked exactly as fake as it literally was, and for some sets they didn't even try to make it look like it was set in a futuristic environment where they have advanced technology of any sort, if you were channel jumping and landed on this movie in many cases you'd be forgiven for thinking it's just another regular 80s movie set in the 80s starring Ahnuld, you'd definitely not think it was a sci-fi movie in any way, it does a very poor job setting up the environment and time it supposedly takes place in and that bores me a lot when I watch it, I wanna see cool futuristic things, especially from the point of view of the 80s look on the future as they often had much more interesting ideas of what the future would look like back then, but this movie fails to do so worse than most.

His points regarding nostalgia and growing up with the movie are not completely true for everyone. I watched it for the first time less than a decade ago, and that shit holds up, and will way longer than the remake, because it's a classic and the effects are practical.