Giant Freakin Robot

Hollywood has been stuck in remake mode for years now, but recently they seem particularly focused on remaking the filmography of one particular guy: Dutch director Paul Verhoeven. This past summer saw a new version of Total Recall starring Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale, Jessica Biel, and Bryan Cranston. In February 2014, we’ll get to see director Jose Padilha’s take on Verhoeven’s RoboCop. There’s also a new version of Starship Troopers, based on the novel by Robert Heinlein, and which Verhoeven adapted into a campy, mega-violent film back in 1997. If you’re Paul Verhoeven, I’m not sure whether all these would seem like a compliment or a slap in the face. Thankfully, somebody decided to ask him.

The Playlist recently interviewed Verhoeven and took the time to ask him about all the remakes of his films. Asked about this past summer’s lackluster Total Recall remake, Verhoeven points out that “critics were a lot more complimentary to me and Arnold about the original after the remake came out than they had been been before it.” That’s a spot-on assessment of the differences between the two Total Recalls in my opinion. The remake was slick and pretty, but stripped of all the corniness and the outright weirdness of Verhoeven’s original, it just felt like a hollow and tedious exercise. The original Total Recall is batshit insane in a thousand different ways, but if you strip out all the Schwarzenegger one-liners and three-breasted hookers and psychic conjoined twins and ancient Martian terraforming machines, it turns out you’re left with not much. Watching the remake just made me appreciate the first Total Recall even more.

Len Wiseman’s remake of Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 sci-fi action flick, Total Recall, doesn’t hit Blu-ray until December 18th, but some of the bonus features are starting to trickle out onto the internet for you to take a look at. In this case, there is a newly unveiled deleted scene.

With its lifeless tone, the new Total Recall is the Hollywood prototype of how bad a remake can be. One month after the release of Len Wiseman’s Total Recall, actor Colin Farrell, who played the lead Douglas Quaid and his alter ego Carl Hauser, is coming to terms with the film’s critical and commercial disappointment.

In an interview with the Huffington Post to promote his new film, Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths, the Irish actor spoke candidly about the wasted potential of all the people who worked on Total Recall and his lack of connection with the movie itself. Farrell admitted:

“But it’s really disappointing when a bunch of people — 150 or 200 people — work on something for six months and it doesn’t find the audience that it’s designed to find. But I think, personally, I identify less with the results of films than I used to, which is a good thing.” Farrell continued, “So it’s just a case of dilution — because I still do, a little bit, as an actor. But not a lot. I didn’t read the reviews for “Total Recall” — and not reading them was a huge thing. And it didn’t take much effort. I just didn’t end up reading them, which means I didn’t need to, which means I don’t identify with it that much. But it was disappointing that it didn’t work out.”

There was some anticipation for Len Wiseman’s Total Recall before it was released. Could this movie live up to Paul Verhoeven’s original 1990 film? Could the movie benefit from an update? Could a realistic approach to Total Recall be just the thing it needed to work for a modern audience? After the film was released last month, the answer to these questions was a resounding “No.”

Movieline.com reports that director Paul Verhoeven recently watched the Total Recall reboot and shared his opinion of it at a special screening of his original version in Los Angeles, California. Verhoeven said of the remake:

I think if it would have been done in a straight way, I’m not so sure that it would have worked – at least, not at that time. And recently [in the Total Recall remake], it did not. I get to say that because the producer of the new one said that this was cheesy or something. And Colin Farrell called it in an interview ‘kitschy.’ So I dare to say that his version was not good.