Looper Versus Total Recall

Maybe some of you can help clear up something. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why there is near universal praise for Rian Johnson’s Looper and such virulent disdain for Len Wiseman’s Total Recall. I found both movies were decent, but with significant failings that would prevent them from being great.

Take a look at their numbers on Rotten Tomatoes. Looper is one of the best reviewed films of the year, with a 94% fresh rating. One reviewer went so far as to call it the greatest time travel movie ever.* Too many reviews to count are calling it one of the greatest Sci-Fi films of all time!!! Does Looper really deserve to stand next to Blade Runner, the original Star Wars trilogy, The Matrix, and Alien?

*Apparently this reviewer has never seen Twelve Monkeys, Time Bandits, or Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

And then you’ve got Total Recall with an abysmal 30% on Rotten Tomatoes. The consensus is “While it boasts some impressive action sequences, Total Recall lacks the intricate plotting, wry humor, and fleshed out characters that made the original a sci-fi classic.” It seems that Colin Farrell and Kate Beckinsale failed to outdo Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sharon Stone in the acting department.

I really don’t get it. Here are my assessments of the films as I try to make sense of the discrepancy.

Looper is well-acted, has a surprising twist about two thirds into the movie (not really that surprising in terms of plot, but the radical shift in tone was certainly a surprise), and offers a very unique vision of a dystopian future. I wouldn’t call it original so much as an interesting mishmash of several genres. I’d describe it has Heat meets the Omen, with some time travel thrown in for good measure. But it also suffers from huge plot holes that the director doesn’t seem to think are important, based on what he has had to say about the subject in interviews. It doesn’t even try to make the time travel concept adhere to any basic rules of logic, and the climax is built on a flimsy house of cards. A friend of mine said that she can’t remember having seen a worse movie and that she and her friends laughed through the entire thing. I enjoyed aspects of it, but I was disappointed it wasn’t much better.

With Total Recall, my experience was exactly the opposite. I went in expecting it to be awful, based on all the reviews. But the set design and special effects were extremely well done. I was strongly reminded of the Underworld movies, the way Beckinsale was hamming it up, and when I learned that Wiseman actually directed the Underworld movies, that made a lot more sense. The big problem was that the plot matched the original almost exactly, the one major difference being the trip through the Earth’s core had replaced the journey to Mars. For a movie that is built around not knowing what is reality and what is part of the fictional construct of Rekall, knowing every major plot point in advance kind of kills the suspense. But overall I was pleasantly surprised.

So why all the love for Looper, a glorified B-movie masquerading as pseudo-intellectual social commentary, and none for Total Recall, a remake of a glorified B-movie? I really don’t understand it. I guess people just take it the wrong way when a Schwarzenegger movie gets remade. You’d think that Disney had just announced a shot-for-shot remake of Episode IV or a sequel to Casablanca.

Oh well. At least we can all agree the new Boy Meets World is going to be fantastic.

Check out Decater's new novel, available now at Amazon. Plus, don't forget his earlier books: Ahab's Adventures in Wonderland and Picasso Painted Dinosaurs.