Total Recall Ending Was It A Dream How Much Was Real

Total Recall Ending: Was It A Dream? How Much Was Real?

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Paul Verhoeven and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s sci-fi classic could all be a dream, but the ambiguity as to what really happened is the movie’s point

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Total Recall Ending Was It A Dream How Much Was Real

The 1990 sci-fi movie Total Recall blurs the line between what is real and what is just an implanted memory or dream. The film stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as Douglas Quaid, a construction worker who uses a memory-implanting company called Rekal to take a simulated vacation to Mars as a secret agent. He ends up going on just such an adventure but believes that it is real, the result of real memories that were suppressed. At the end of the film, it is ambiguous as to whether what just happened was real or not.

Total Recall was a loose adaptation of the 1966 short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” by Philip K. Dick, a writer known for bending reality and consciousness in his work, leading to similarly ambiguous movies like Blade Runner and A Scanner Darkly. After going through several planned directors, including David Cronenberg, and dozens of script re-writes, the movie was finally filmed by Paul Verhoeven. The resulting movie was a commercial and critical success and one whose meaning has been debated to this day.

Total Recall begins with Quaid having visions of Mars and a mysterious woman. He travels to Rekall to implant the memory of being a secret agent on Mars, having always wanted to travel to the red planet. Everything that happens after that is suspect. There are two major possibilities. Either everything that Quaid experiences is real, or it is all (or almost all) a very well-crafted ruse to give him an exciting experience. Like other movies with ambiguous endings like Inception, ultimately the lack of clarity is the point, highlighting the fragility and unreliability of memories.

Why Everything Might Be Real

Total Recall Ending Was It A Dream How Much Was Real

The most straightforward explanation is the one Total Recall presents on the surface: that Quaid’s memory implant was botched, and everything he experiences after that is real. Rekall is unable to implant the memories into Quaid because he has real, repressed memories of being a secret agent on Mars working to destroy a rebellion there. Everything about Quaid’s life on Earth was a construct, including his relationship with his wife Lori, who is actually an agent sent to monitor him, played by Sharon Stone, who later appeared in Basic Instinct, which was also directed by Paul Verhoeven.

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Quaid travels to Mars and finds Melina, the woman from his dreams. He later learns that it was his prior identity, Carl Hauser, who created the Quaid persona to avoid the mind-reading rebel leader Kuato. However, with his new memories, Quaid decides to side with the rebels and kill the government leader Cohaagen. His actions also lead to the transformation of Mars’s atmosphere into a breathable world.

The biggest evidence of the events on Mars being real is Quaid’s dreams of Mars and Melina at the beginning of the movie before he has undergone the Rekall treatment. In addition to these dreams, there are also scenes in the movie that do not have Quaid in them, and thus cannot be directly depicting the result of his dreams. However, there are compelling reasons to believe that Quaid dreams everything, including plot points Total Recall borrowed from the John Carter books.

Why Everything Might Be Fake

Total Recall Ending Was It A Dream How Much Was Real

Partway through his adventure, Quaid encounters Dr. Edgemar, who performed the memory implant procedure on him, alongside his wife Lori. Edgemar explains what is essentially an alternate interpretation of events: that Quaid has suffered a schizoid embolism, and the fantasy vacation he has requested has merged with his real-life subconscious to create a memory from which he cannot escape. Quaid’s subconscious has constructed a scenario in which his ordinary life gives way to the more exciting one promised by Rekall. Edgemar points out that everything Quaid requested to be in his vacation has come true, from an exciting spy adventure with action fitting an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie to meeting a woman that exactly fits his preferences.

The main evidence pointing to Quaid’s adventure being a fantasy is the sheer improbability of it. Everyone Quaid encounters is part of the conspiracy against him, but he miraculously outshoots them all, living the promised “Ego Trip.” The ending, where Quaid turns Mars into an Earth-like paradise, also seems too good to be true. Elements that Edgemar proposed, such as a Hilton suite and alien artifacts, also appear.

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One of those coworkers, Harry, tells Quaid in the early part of the movie not to go to Rekall, as it almost lobotomized a friend of his. Edgemar’s assistant tells him that Quaid is suffering from “another schizoid embolism”, suggesting that he has suffered the same fate as the earlier man, and not the unique result of having an already-suppressed memory. This ambiguity is part of what has made Total Recall so memorable, parodied in Rick and Morty and other shows. Ultimately, Quaid decides that Edgemar is lying because he still fears death in the supposed dream, but uncertainty still remains – as seen at the end of the movie, where Quaid wonders if everything was all a dream.

Why It Doesn’t Matter

The only part of Total Recall that is definitely true is the first twenty minutes of the movie before Quaid undergoes the memory implant procedure. From there, the two possible options are everything being Quaid’s paranoid fantasy, or the events really occurring, with no real options for a middle ground. But the ambiguity in the movie is precisely the point.

Total Recall highlights how memories can be unreliable, and peoples’ perception of reality is molded in ways that suit their inner narratives. Other Dick stories, such as Minority Report, often question the nature of perception and consciousness, and the author was fascinated by how minds could be altered. Similarly, director Paul Verhoeven’s movies often explore the thin line between Hollywood spectacle and reality.

These influences suggest that the purpose of Total Recall is not to encourage audiences to unravel the reality of what happened but to point out that the unreliability of human memory challenges our understanding of ourselves and the world we live in. Even if all Quaid’s experiences are real, it means the life he lived at the beginning of the movie was a lie, implanted by false memories. While Total Recall uses a science-fictional plot, real memories can be altered by everything from hypnosis to the passage of time, meaning that the movie has serious implications for how we think about ourselves and our histories.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/total-recall-ending-dream-real-schwarzenegger-movie/

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