Mind over matters.
We don’t “own” much of anything anymore.
Not our music, not our movies, not our data. Our social feeds belong to advertisers, our hardware can be forced into obsolescence, and the shows we “buy” on streaming can disappear overnight.
But we can still make up our own damn minds. That still belongs to us.
In the future, corporations won’t just fight for your attention span – they’ll live inside your head and charge you rent.
Why just sell you a product when they can sell you memories wholesale, complete with built-in product placements? Imagine waking up with a fully-branded vacation package lodged in your brain, ready to trigger nostalgia for places you’ve never been and experiences you never had.
That’s Total Recall in a nutshell – the ultimate state-sanctioned, corporate-approved brainwashing package. A vacation from yourself, with one small catch: when you get home, are you still you?
Verhoeven is anything but subtle, and Total Recall fits right in with his futurist worldview: state television pumping out propaganda, a vapid consumerist society happy to let the powerful crush anyone who gets in their way, and corporations so bloated they decide who’s real and who isn’t.
You can call it a dystopian satire, a sci-fi mindbender, or just an excuse to watch Arnold blast his way through Mars. All valid takes.
But watching it now, it feels less like speculation and more like a warning. If you’re buying into the promise of a better life, make sure you can still afford to change your mind. -Pop
Total Recall got its ass to Home Video today in 1990, after a June 1st theatrical release.