What we know about Len Wiseman’s Total Recall

A classic of 90s action cinema, Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall was full of delightful incongruous images. Arnold Schwarzenegger pulling a golf ball-sized tracking device from his nostril, or beating the hell out of clueless goons while wearing a lumberjack shirt.

And yet, as insanely brilliant as Total Recall was, Verhoeven and Schwarzenegger's film drove colossal tank tracks over Philip K. Dick's original short story, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, using the slight material as a launch pad for a sprawling space opera with only distant echoes of the author's paranoia-ridden questioning of reality.

The news that Len Wiseman is set to remake Total Recall has filled many fans of the original with consternation, and it's certainly true that Verhoeven's film doesn't need to be rehashed. Few directors could match the original film's manic pace and joyous sense of the absurd and it's difficult to imagine a Hollywood studio giving the go-ahead to such a violent big-budget film.

However, in an interview with Collider, producer Neal Moritz has suggested that Len Wiseman's Total Recall will be anything but a mere remake. In fact, much of what Moritz says about the picture is extremely positive. For one thing, he insists that the new film will remain "closer" to Dick's short story.

Moritz also confirms that Colin Farrell will be playing the lead role in the film, which is itself a significant indicator of where Wiseman's film will be headed. Far from the muscle-bound warrior presented in Verhoeven's movie, the protagonist in We Can Remember It For You Wholesale is an ordinary, somewhat meek everyman called Douglas Quail. The casting of Farrell would certainly fit Dick's writing better than Schwarzenegger ever could.

While the new Total Recall is likely to be closer to Dick's story in terms of tone, Wiseman's film will nevertheless retain the epic sweep of Verhoeven's 90s adaptation, with Moritz describing the film as "bigger in scope" than Battle: Los Angeles.

"I think the world that Len Wiseman is creating is incredible," Moritz said. "It's a real world, a real future world, where the cities have just gotten so overcrowded that the cities are just built up, up, up, up. It's just everything I see on the movie, every pre-vis I see on the movie, every conceptual drawing on this movie that I see just makes me more and more excited. We're playing it like a real world, but there's all these technological advancements to the real world, and it's just really, it's cool."

Moritz also hints at a "great twist" at the end of the film, and talks rather enigmatically about the fact that it won't "go to space", but instead, "there's something that takes us from one side of the planet to another that's really interesting."

That the new Total Recall will at least attempt to be its own film rather than a warmed-over remake is, at least for us, quite encouraging. It's worth noting, too, that while Total Recall has been described as a major "tentpole" picture, it won't be shot in 3D ("We decided that it would be too much," says Moritz), a further sign, perhaps, that the film won't be a mere cash-in on a much loved name.

Total Recall is set to commence shooting on 15 May in Toronto. And while some question marks still remain (not least due to the fact that Wiseman hasn't yet directed a genuinely great movie), we're cautiously optimistic that he can create a new slant on We Can Remember It For You Wholesale that complements Paul Verhoeven's 90s action classic instead of merely detracting from it.

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