It's Total Recall All Over Again Kurt Wimmer gets his ass to Mars
It was a few months ago that word came out that a Total Recall remake was in the works. Now comes the news that Kurt Wimmer, he of Equilibrium and Ultraviolet, has signed up to write the do-over - something that we're told will be a "contemporised adaptation" of the Philip K. Dick story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale*.
Is this a good thing? Well, we here at Empire are big Equilibrium apologists, even if none of us can muster any love for Ultraviolet. And Wimmer's history as a screenwriter is stronger: he's recently been working on Angelina Jolie-starrer Salt and scripted the really rather good The Thomas Crown Affair remake. If he signs on to direct, however, we're going to need evidence that he's moved a long way on from that Milla Jovovich effort.
It remains to be seen if this will bear any resemblance whatsoever to Dick's story - the last one certainly didn't - but as long as it has a lady with three boobs in it, we're sure that people will still turn out in droves to see it.
*Best title ever? Even by Dickian standards? We think so.
Total Recal stinks in places...come on.......some of the mutants are just silly. PKD deserves better..how about The 3 stigmata of Palmer Eldritch or Now wait for last year rather than recycling? Doesn't anyone in the movie business read books? ... Read More
...Total Recall is as faithful an adaptation of the story as it's possible to get. In the sense that the story is very, very short and basically just a character and concept that starts and ends, with next to no plot. Any adaptation that lasts more than ten minutes will have to concoct an awful lot of extra stuff to fill out the running time. Total Recall - wonderful, brilliant film, by the way - is tonally and conceptually spot on as far as Dick adaptations go. In other words, just like Dick's... Read More
Dear Empire Magazine.
You pride yourseves as lovers of film. I challenge you NOT to cover remakes of films that are nothing more than a cash-in. YOU need to support a move to get Hollywood to make original movies.
Will you have the balls to do this? Will you telll Hollyood that you are not interested in remakes? ... Read More
If it's a "contemporised adaptation" of the source material? There would not be nearly as much fuss about this particular "re-make" if they didn't call it Total Recall, because then it wouldn't be a "re-make" at all! It'd be another take on the story. I understand name recognition and all that, but surely they're just setting themselves up for a kicking when they force people to compare it to the terrific Schwarzenegger version which is still fresh in everyone's min... Read More
I can understand the frustration when a favourite movie is getting the remake/reboot/re-imagining/redux/re-newbuzzword, but please, get some perspective and realise that not all remakes are bad.
I've argued the cause for remakes plenty times in the past, and for every Psycho, there is a Man on Fire, for every Planet of the Apes, there is a The Thing.
If remakes/reboots were outlawed, which I've heard plenty of people demand in the past, we would have missed out on movies like the ones I've... Read More
