Why remake total recall

He seems to have gone to the same trainer. The big why is, Why bother? Golden-age Hollywood, itself an assembly line in the business of manufacturing dreams, often produced remakes. In the old days, though, movies played their initial run and, for the most part, disappeared. With no access to a video library, and few revival houses, viewers consumed movies and consigned them to faulty memory.

In the 21st century, almost every movie is available for viewing; a remake never has the shock of the new — only a, at best, fresh take on familiar merchandise. Audiences can be counted on to see a remake of a venerable hit rather than some work of startling originality, the way children demand to hear a favorite fairy tale for the hundredth time. Still, there ought to be a reason, beyond the opening-weekend gross, for a director to spend a year of his life at the cinematic drawing board, tracing the contours of a famous movie.

But action-packed chases and a handful of Minority Report moments do not a great movie make. Neither does layering on a little War on Terror propaganda and class revolt just to add a patina of modern urgency.

Queue up the version to refresh your memory about how much fun a sci-fi flick can be. Lewis Wallace is the culture editor of Wired. When he's not working with words, he plays bass in squeezebox rock band Those Darn Accordions. Thus, we get the basic Blade Runner cityscape: monsoonal rain and humidity, perma-dusk and millions of Asian people with parasols. The cops look like Imperial Stormtroopers, while their synthetic replacements — echoes of RoboCop — look exactly like leftover assembly-line cyborgs from I, Robot.

The enormously detailed and, I'll concede, rather impressive set design owes a lot to the multi-tiered modernist Babel of Lang's Metropolis, which is just a classier kind of pilfery. What is lacking is the vivid tabloid energy of Verhoeven's film, that capacity to lay high ideas in among the kind of low-brow violence and sex that hits the audience in its collective sweet spot, right when they least expect it — and most enjoy it.

Ironically titled production companies aside, the other thing I like about Total Recall 2. As someone who considers that franchise a Eurotrash Twilight with bloodbags — and no worth as horror or film — I'll take that as compensation. Total Recall - a remake to forget.