Total Recall – 1990 (WINNER)
It has been a very long time since I have seen this movie. Watching it again now, I was unsure of how its effects would hold up. But I was pleasantly surprised… for the most part. The effects were good. Not perfect, but good. It was a perfect example of a Schwarzenegger action film, and in that regard, it didn’t disappoint. It was incredibly violent, and by the time the movie was over, the body count was incredibly high, but it had an intellectual edge to it that can’t be ignored.
The story took place in the future, 2084 to be exact, and offered a fairly realistic and believable picture of the futuristic setting. Technology was portrayed as advanced, but not ridiculously so. There were self-driving cars, portable personal hologram devices, colonies on Mars, and vacations to Saturn. The driving concept of the plot is the concept of purchasing memories, so that you could remember a perfect vacation without having to actually take it.
That being said, the visual effects were mostly good. Unfortunately, there were certain effects that were horrible, bordering on comical, and I don’t think they were supposed to be. For me, the worst special effects were the ones that took place on Mars. Whenever someone was exposed to the super-thin Martian atmosphere, their faces would distort, their tongue would bloat, their eyes would expand and bulge out of their skulls, and they would turn in to gross versions of cartoon characters that didn’t look remotely realistic. In the film’s climax, when Arnold and his woman suffer this fate, they are saved at the last minute. Their faces return to normal before they die, but after such extreme trauma to the eyes, mouth, nose, and ears, there isn’t a hint of blood or damaged flesh.
As is becoming increasingly true, the special effects are very specifically interwoven with the production design and the makeup effects. But my little bit of research has revealed to me that this movie was one of the last major big budget films to use extensive scale models. There were only a few brief shots in the film that showed the bleak Martian landscape. But it was all a real model that was filmed, and then composited with live actors.
But the mysterious mutant, Kuato, was a baby-like person living from another man’s stomach, like some kind of parasite. He was created using complex puppetry, cables, electronic animatronics, and the like, and was actually very well done, if not pleasant to look at. I liked how they showed how the host body continued to breathe while the mutant creature was moving ad speaking.
Add to all that a simple trick of a sideways camera to make it look like people were floating horizontally without the use of wires, as they got sucked out of a giant passage to the Martian surface, and you had a pretty cool, action packed climax to a fun film. Also, I liked the fat lady’s head that split apart in sections, revealing that she was Arnold wearing a mask the whole time. That was pretty cool!