Sounds pretty deep, right? And also, to those who enjoyed the original Arnold Schwarzenegger movie back in 1990, somewhat unlike the source material (Well, a source material; the original Total Recall was loosely based on a Philip K. Dick short story, which I’ll get to in a minute). Yes, Arnold discovered that his memories had been tampered with, and yes, that theoretically left him in a situation where he was as much a mystery to himself as he was to the audience… but only up to a point. After all, this was an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie; you could pretty much predict what he would end up doing before the movie had even started with a degree of certainty (Spoiler: It likely involved some level of violence and no small amount of puns and quips, the latter of which, sadly, will be missing from the new version. Colin Farrell has already told reporters “I don’t have one-liners” in the 2012 movie). The original Total Recall didn’t ask “Who is this man?” as much as yell “We don’t know who this man is necessarily, but boy, can he kick ass – in space!”
More cut-from-the-final-draft (although, in this case, it was reworked and reappeared) from my Time work; this comes from today’s piece, which didn’t really come together the way I wanted it to, sadly. Ah, well.