Total Recall

So, saw the new Total Recall. Haven't done a review in a while. I didn't like it, so let's go positive first.

I really liked the production design, the look of the city and the computers and the cars. Put more accurately, of all the futures that ripped off Minority Report's aesthetic, I liked this one's look the best.

It wasn't as blatantly misogynist as its source material, although if anything it was more paranoid, and without his excuse.

And that's it. Now for the bad.

The plot was an absolute by-the-numbers "good rebels, bad empire" story, without anyone given a speck of motivation or backstory other than "we're all-holy sinless rebels" or "of course we're evil, we have a colony". That is my country's founding legend and I found the plot offensively Jingoistic; how does this horse-hockey play in Spain? (Speaking of? All you anti-American post-colonial thinkers? Yeah, guess what, the Yankee forcibly converted you to his founding mythos without your knowledge. You did realize that, right?)

Also, when people embark on wars of annihilation, they do not use infantry, they carpet-bomb. Unless the target has some resource that'd be lost that way, but, uh, what does The Colony have, exactly? It's a slum. "We can't bomb Kowloon, we need to preserve the infrastructure for after our invasion"—that is a sentence that can't be spoken, right there.

The writing was subpar. It felt like a first draft, probably by a high schooler. Seriously, "That was no dream, that was a memory"? Could we be more pointlessly portentous? Could we be more cliché? We've pretty much already established that that's what's going on in his head—why not have her say "Whatever they did to your memories must not've completely affected your unconscious mind", or something else that would be both realistic and actually useful? And don't even get me started on the rebel leader's stupid speech: adding in a lot of Gnostic-sounding mumbo-jumbo doesn't make your movie any more Phildickian.

Speaking of, "The Fall enslaves us all"? You're actually worse at this quasi-Gnostic misappropriated Christian terminology than Philip K. Dick, and he had bipolar disorder aggravated by amphetamines, and was friends with Robert Heinlein.

Oh yes, speaking of the Fall. It's basically an orbit elevator, but it goes through the planet's core. Because as we all know, the cheapest way to do commuter travel is to send a subway car through a fission reactor on a 13,000 km long carbon-filament cable. (No, they never said it was carbon filament, but guess what's the only substance you can make kilometers-long cables out of?)

Also, in order to commute through the Earth in one day, you have to move 532 kph. Or 2/3 of Mach 1. Given their commute appears to take about 40 minutes—one side of the planet to the other—they must be moving about 19,000 kph, or nearly Mach 16. Since they don't seem to spend most of their time accelerating, I guess they're pulling multiple Gs. That's why they were all in G-force suits, and strapped in up to the eyeballs. No, wait, they weren't, they behaved exactly like they were getting on a subway car that never exceeds 90 kph.