Total Recall in Theaters Now

Just so you know, I did not see the first Total Recall, so I went into this movie with fresh eyes. The previews made it look pretty exciting, but nowadays, there are mainly two kinds of previews. There are previews that hook you with the first ten or twenty minutes of a movie and don't really give anything away. And then there are previews that tell you the whole story in a nutshell. They are great summaries, but they spoil too much. Total Recall's preview was a bit like the latter. Actually, it was somewhat worse than the latter. It made me think the movie would go one way and be more complicated. In reality, they were faking it. The movie was straightforward with barely any twists and turns and ended up disappointing. I don't think there was any way the movie, as it is, could have won with me. On one hand, I was disappointed that the story wasn't more complicated. But if it had been more complicated, it would have been one of those movies that messes with your mind and makes you wonder what's reality (like Inception, but Inception did it right), and in this case, having everything be in a guy's head would have been even more disappointing.

The cool factor of this movie is definitely the setting (layers upon layers of city suspended in the air!) and the chase scenes that go through it. Kate Beckinsale isn't a vampire this time, but she's as scary as one and looks as good as any vampire ever did (She's 39!).

Not as cool are scenes of nudity and the actual logistics of this science fiction flick, based on a story by Philip K. Dick. I don't mind suspending disbelief for science fiction, but it is a little beyond that to have people commute to work in a 17-minute trip called The Fall through the core of the earth. Cool, yes, but way beyond believable.

Other plot holes make this a story you don't want to think too much about, but it doesn't seem to have been trying too hard to stimulate any brain function. If you watch it, enjoy the scenery and the pretty people (including Colin Farrell and Jessica Biel) beating each other up, but don't expect much else. This is not one of Philip K. Dick's better stories, but maybe the written story is better.

Rated PG-13. Two hours. Two and a half stars. Wait for the DVD.

The Adjustment Bureau

I was excited to see The Adjustment Bureau because I knew it dealt with the world in a matrix-y kind of way, not that I would compare it to The Matrix at all. It's not the same, but it carried that same sense of wrongness with the world, of things being arranged beyond human control. It actually reminded me a little bit of Dark City, though it wasn't nearly as...well, dark.

I ended up being disappointed in the movie. Perhaps I wanted it to be a little darker and deeper than it was, to have a greater sense of an evil force at work controlling humankind. The "bad guys," or the world adjusters, came off as more of an angelic intervention by human-looking nonhumans who take their orders from the Chairman...or you might as well call him “the man upstairs.” The movie is never clear on who they are, so for the sake of this review's clarity, we'll call them angels from now on.

And if you've read my other reviews, you know what I think of putting angels in fiction. Normally, it doesn't work for me, and this was no exception. Though the angels were wrong sometimes, I never got a sense that what they were doing was evil, and to be honest, I wanted it to be evil. I wanted the protagonist lovers to be fighting for a good reason, other than just the right to control their own destinies.

What I really didn't like was that at the end, after the whole movie talks about the Chairman's Plan, (spoilers here) the protagonists end up following an original Plan that had previously been scrapped. So, in my opinion, they never controlled their destinies after all. They just followed the Plan that was meant to be in the first place. Disappointing. As for who they say the Chairman is, more unsatisfactory, vague, mumbo jumbo answers.

I wanted to like the movie, and I wish I could give it something. My husband liked the dialog between the main characters, but to be honest, it's already left my mind, having seen it a few days ago, and I can't tell you my personal opinion. I do remember discussing with him that we understood the man better than the woman, that we didn't really get her motivation or see why she would give everything up for this guy.

This movie is based on a short story: "Adjustment Team," by Philip K. Dick. I've seen some of the other movies made from his stories, and I enjoyed those better: The Minority Report and Paycheck. The Adjustment Bureau is an interesting portrayal of what it means to have free will, but maybe the story was lost in translation from paper to movie. Perhaps my husband will comment on why he enjoyed it a little more than I did.

But if you're looking for something with more tension and real bad guys, I think Dark City is better.