by David Hughes
Employing ReKall technology, each operative has dual identities, both stored on digital disk: one disk contains their birth and upbringing through each of their missions logged and catalogued in detail — this is their real, or ‘Alpha’ life. The second disk contains their lives up to a point — their real childhood is used, but at some key juncture a new ‘program’ has been written, with a normal, run-of-the-mill ‘Beta’ life, the identity these elite agents possess when off-mission. Thus, the agents are only restored to their true selves (for Quaid, the Hauser persona) when they are on-mission; as soon as their missions are completed, they resume their Beta lives with no knowledge or memory of their agency activities. “That way,” Brogan tells him, “should we want to betray the agency, or should anyone get their hands on us, we’ll be useless.”
Quaid learns all this from a digital recording of York Brogan (echoes of the cement factory scene from Total Recall), who urges him to break Chris Park out of the Pasternak Institute for the Criminally Insane, where he has been held since his memory implant failed to take. (Quaid is also shown footage of his own mission history, among which Cirulnick slyly includes images from such Schwarzenegger films as Predator, True Lies, The Terminator and Commando.) Meanwhile, things on Earth are hotting up — literally: the turbinium bomb appears to have swollen the sun until it swallows up Mercury and threatens to burn all life on Earth to a cinder. Global warming accelerates on a catastrophic scale, as giant holes appear in the sky, through which deadly heat rays scorch the Earth (a cinematic cataclysm subsequently explored in The Core).
Meanwhile, Quaid helps Chris to escape, the pair head to Mars (disguised as a fat Samoan and his Japanese wife), where Brogan and Maggie appear to be in Strickrodt’s employ, the latter also (much to Quaid’s chagrin) in his bed. Maggie explains that she and Brogan are on a ReKall mission to infiltrate Strickrodt’s inner circle. Through her, they learn that the hijacking was a set-up, and that Strickrodt used them to send the turbinium bomb into the sun, hoping that the devastation of life on Earth would lead its inhabitants to flock to Mars. Quaid and his team counter with a plan of their own: using explosive charges planted in its turbinium core, they intend to blow up Mars, hoping that the resulting “gravity gap” causes the Earth to shift into the vacuum previously occupied by Mars, thus saving the planet from the expanding sun.
Before they can implement their plan, however, Dr Jaslove shows up (à la Dr Edgemar’s second act appearance in Total Recall) and tells him he’s still at ReKall Incorporated, where he has been in a coma ever since the accident on the space bridge — the point at which he ‘discovered’ that his secret agent fantasies were true. His fellow agents, his mission to Mars and Earth’s impending destruction by an expanding sun are all products of his imagination! Dr Jaslove shows him vid-phone images of Earth, his own comatose body and Lori at his bedside, and tells him that if he does not snap out of his delusion, he will suffer a fatal embolism. Quaid refuses to believe, vowing to continue his mission, but as his ‘fantasy’ continues, Ladson floors him with a further revelation: that even his ‘true’ identity, Hauser, was merely the invention of a military supercomputer (provoking the potentially classic Schwarzenegger line, “Then if I’m not me, or Hauser... who the hell am I?”). Refusing to believe any of this, Quaid secures the planting of the turbinium charges and blows up Mars, the fragments of which circle Earth in a ring similar to that of Saturn while Earth assumes the position of the destroyed planet.
No sooner has the explosion occurred, however, than Quaid wakes up at ReKall, where the news announcer is commenting on Mars’ destruction, which has shifted Earth’s orbit and saved it from the swelling sun. “Scientists say the Mars explosion was an unexplained phenomenon, and may be the result of the sun’s growth, which pressurized Mars’ turbinium core,” the anchorwoman announces. “Earth’s a little worse for wear, but she’ll live — and hopefully like her makeover!” Quaid — either denied the credit for saving the planet, or recovered from his schizoid embolism, depending on which version of events he and the audience chooses to believe — is reunited with Maggie/Sue at the space bridge, where they kiss in front of the awe-inspiring view of Earth, complete with its ring of Martian debris — an exact reprise of the Melina/Quaid clinch at the end of Total Recall.
“I turned in the script,” says Cirulnick. “They dug it, Jesse Berdinka dug it, my agents dug it. Everything was cool. I was all fired up. I kept calling and calling, ‘Hey, what’s happening?’” Eventually, Cirulnick heard that Schwarzenegger had read the draft, and that a meeting had been arranged between Bob Weinstein, Andrew Rona and the star. “My understanding is that meeting took place,” the writer says. “I never found out specifically what happened — all I know is after that I got a call from Miramax who asked me would I be interested in rewriting the script to shrink the budget down. Maybe they wanted to cut money out of the below-the-line stuff to give more money to Schwarzenegger. It began to look like they couldn’t make a deal with Schwarzenegger, and it may have had something to do with Miramax not thinking that his stock was high enough for the fee he was asking. After that,” says Cirulnick, “Andrew Rona told me that they were beginning to talk about other people — Vin Diesel’s name was mentioned — but it never happened. I think at the time Vin Diesel was paid $20 million to do xXx, so I guess he wasn’t going to be that much cheaper than Schwarzenegger.”
Although Cirulnick half-expected to be asked to rewrite it for another actor, his agents advised against it: “They said, ‘Look, if it’s not going to go with Schwarzenegger, don’t write any more on the project. You want to have written the script for Schwarzenegger, not some other guy. It’s a dynamite sample, but don’t get too wedded to it.’” For most of 2001 and 2002, Dimension’s partner company, Miramax, suffered a series of flops and financial disasters, including the expensive collapse of Talk magazine, ballooning costs on Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York and MGM’s abrupt exit from its co-production deal on Chicago — from which it did not recover until Chicago turned a profit in 2003. So when a comprehensive Variety profile failed to mention Total Recall 2 among the future projects either of Miramax or Dimension, Cirulnick surmised that the project was dead. “I think the monetary issue, the economics of the script and the film, and not being able to make a deal with Schwarzenegger cost the film momentum, and that was it,” he says. “I left a man down on the battlefield and there was nothing more that could be done.”
Dimension refused to let it die, however, offering Shusett and Goldman a chance to write another draft: “They called us and said, ‘Here’s Matt’s ideas — let’s blend them with your action set pieces, which we love,’ because, as we do in the first one, we had a lot of unusual special effects ideas, some humorous, some bizarre. They said, ‘Can you fit these into Matt’s plot?’ And we said, ‘Yeah, we can do that.’” Shusett and Goldman wrote what they describe as “a beat sheet, just five or six pages,” showing how a new version, combining Cirulnick’s story with their set pieces, might look. “Andrew Rona said, ‘This is wonderful — it’s a combination of what Matt had come up with and how you guys see it having to be re-channelled to fit your action sequences. I’ll give this to Arnold right now.’ And Bob said, ‘I’m completely convinced that you guys can deliver on the script. If [Arnold] buys the concept, we’ll make the movie.’” Yet again, Schwarzenegger shot down the script.
In the meantime, former Carolco partners Andrew G. Vajna and Mario Kassar reunited to form C2 Productions, one of their first moves being to purchase the rights to Schwarzenegger’s most successful franchise, the Terminator series. While James Cameron, director of The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, passed on the chance to make Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Schwarzenegger agreed to reprise his most famous role, with Breakdown writer-director Jonathan Mostow at the helm. Around the same time, Vajna and Kassar entered negotiations with Dimension to re-acquire the sequel rights to Total Recall. Although that deal reportedly fell apart in early 2003, the $75 milli
on US opening of Terminator 3 put Arnie back on the box office map, leading Shusett and Goldman to approach Bob Weinstein with yet another concept, presented as a five-page treatment.
“We have a lot of funny new ideas, including six or seven very unique and funny and bizarre set pieces which we wrote in our ’98 draft which we’re transplanting into this,” Goldman said in 2004. “The plot will be very complex again, and very much fantasy versus reality. We hope to shock the audience — something that most films would be afraid to do — by having the audience think something completely different as to how they interpreted the first movie. You see that in the first half hour. And that’ll be the first shock. And from then it’ll go on twisting back and forth towards ‘fantasy versus reality’, but with a new storyline involving a new leading lady.” And possibly a new leading man. “The way we’ve sent it to him is flexible,” Shusett notes, “so if Arnold’s not available, or he doesn’t want to do it, or ends up being Governor of California, it can be done with another actor.”
Although Goldman and Shusett’s plans for Total Recall 2 came to nought, interest in the property remained relatively constant, not least because of associations with the ‘recall’ of California Governor Gray Davis, prompting a snap election in which he was replaced by Schwarzenegger himself. Although this, naturally, led to some humorous Internet memes revolving around the Total Recall concept, Schwarzenegger’s governorship put his acting career on hiatus for the next eight years. By the time he was back, plans were well underway not for a sequel to Total Recall, but a remake, based on a new screenplay by Kurt Wimmer (Ultraviolet, Salt), Mark Bomback (Die Hard 4.0, aka Live Free or Die Hard) and James Vanderbilt (Zodiac, The Amazing Spider-Man). With a cast led by Colin Farrell — who, in an example of synchronicity worthy of Philip K. Dick himself, had co-starred in Spielberg’s Minority Report — the film was scheduled for release in 2012, more than two decades after the release of the original.
Fans clamouring for a sequel would have to make do with Dynamite Entertainment’s four-issue comic book miniseries, scripted by Vince Moore, the storyline of which was a direct continuation of the 1990 film. “Nowadays I think it’s hard to have strong feelings about movies, given how many older movies are being remade,” Moore told Comic Book Resources on the eve of the first issue’s publication. “I loved the original movie. It in turn led to my reading of the source short story and enjoying that as a very different experience. I’m sure the new movie will be its own experience as well. I am curious to see what the new version of Total Recall will look like,” he added, “and I hope it does well. But it will be its own thing and may not have anything in common with the ’90s film other than the title.” Not to worry, though. “After all,” runs the final line of the Philip K. Dick short story that all of the various adaptations share, “the real one probably would not be long in coming.”
KEEPING UP WITH THE JONESES
Separating fact from fiction in the development of Indy IV
“I was done with the Indiana Jones series, and Harrison got very proactive with both George and [me] and said, ‘I want to play Indy one more time.’ So he started this. Blame him.”
— Steven Spielberg
When Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was released in 1989, director Steven Spielberg, producer George Lucas and actor Harrison Ford insisted that after three blockbusting adventures — two of them in the all-time box office top ten — the whip-cracking archaeologist Dr Henry ‘Indiana’ Jones Jr was hanging up his battered fedora for good; The Last Crusade would also be Indy’s last adventure. “There was a reason I invented the shot of Harrison Ford riding a horse into the sunset,” said Spielberg, “because I thought that brought the curtain down on the trilogy.”
Fans continued to pester the triumvirate about the possibility of another sequel though, and in 1994, at a Venice Film Festival press conference, Harrison Ford let slip that he was “reading scripts” for a fourth Indy film — and the rumours began. Although it would be another fourteen years before ideas coalesced, schedules aligned and enthusiasm returned to make Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in 2007/2008, the intervening period saw no shortage of proposed storylines and scripts for the fourth film, all purporting to be the real ‘Indy IV’.
Lucas first dreamed up the character of Indiana Jones in 1973, four years before Star Wars made movie history. Named after Lucas’ enormous malamute dog (also the inspiration for Chewbacca), ’Indiana’ Smith was conceived as an archaeologist-adventurer who used the spoils of his relic hunting expeditions to finance a lavish playboy lifestyle. Although Indy’s rough-around-the-edges appeal also channelled everyone from Cary Grant to Humphrey Bogart, Indy had a quality seldom found in his silver screen forebears: he was generally either out of his depth, or deep in trouble. “Indy was always in over his head,” Lucas noted. “He wasn’t up to what he was supposed to be, to be what the old classic Republic serial hero was.”
Lucas fleshed out the idea with his friend and fellow filmmaker Philip Kaufman, who would later direct an update of ’50s sci-fi classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers. “He got very excited about it,” Lucas recalled, “and we started working on it for three or four weeks. He had the idea of making the supernatural, sacred object that we were looking for the Ark of the Covenant. Then Phil went off to work on a Clint Eastwood movie,” he added, referring to Kaufman’s script for the 1976 Western, The Outlaw Josey Wales, “so I put it back on the shelf and let it gather some more dust. And then I shot Star Wars.”
It was while Lucas and Spielberg were holidaying in Hawaii, to escape the furore of Star Wars’ opening weekend, that Lucas first mentioned his idea to his friend. “I said, ‘I’ve always wanted to direct a James Bond picture,’” Spielberg recalled, “and George said, ‘I have a better idea, called Raiders of the Lost Ark.’” Spielberg, who, like Lucas, grew up on swashbuckling adventure serials, immediately responded to the tales of derring-do. “I told him how it was about an archaeologist,” said Lucas, “and how it was like a Saturday matinee serial, and he got in one mess after another, and he said, ‘Fantastic. Let’s do this.’” There was only one thing Spielberg didn’t like: the name, ‘Indiana’ Smith. “I said, ‘All right, what if we called him ‘Indiana’ Jones.’ He said, “Okay, that’s fine.’”
Next, they needed a writer to turn their story outline into a fully-fledged first draft. Spielberg had just optioned Continental Divide, a script by a young writer named Lawrence Kasdan, whom he felt might be suitable for the job. Three days were spent outlining the character, the plot and the set pieces, the results of which, Kasdan has said, closely resemble the final film. “Larry added so much wit and humour, and brought in such a 1930s Preston Sturges meets Michael Curtiz [vibe],” Spielberg recalled. “Larry layered it and flavoured it and brought it to life.”
By now, the sheen of Spielberg’s first two theatrical blockbusters, Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, had been tarnished somewhat by the critical and commercial failure of 1941, and the director saw Raiders of the Lost Ark as the perfect comeback. “I was really tired when 1941 came out,” he told Empire in 2006, the 25th anniversary of Raiders’ release. “I didn’t know how to take a punch, and I kind of took the sting of all the criticism and verbal abuse the movie was receiving. I wanted to go back to work and make a movie that didn’t take 178 days and go so far over budget. I wanted to have fun.” But if Spielberg and Lucas thought the combined clout of Star Wars and Jaws was enough to guarantee a green-light for their $20 million action-adventure, they were wrong: Raiders of the Lost Ark was turned down by every studio in Hollywood, before Paramount decided to give it the go-ahead. Now all they needed was a leading man.
Spielberg’s first suggestion was Harrison Ford, a supporting actor in two of Lucas’ earlier films, American Graffiti and Star Wars. Lucas, however, resisted. “I didn’t want him to be my Bobby De Niro, where he was in every one of my movies,” he explained, referring to Martin Scorsese’s long-term partnership with the s
tar of Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. After testing Tim Matheson, Peter Coyote and others, it was Tom Selleck’s screen test (with future Blade Runner actress Sean Young) that convinced Lucas and Spielberg they found their man. Unfortunately, Selleck was committed to a TV show, Magnum P.I., and would not be available to shoot Raiders. “I said, ‘What will we do now?’” Lucas recalled. “Steve said, ‘What about Harrison?”
Raiders of the Lost Ark opened in US cinemas on 21 June 1981, instantly making stars of both Harrison Ford and Indiana Jones. When the film grossed $242 million in the US, a total of $432 million worldwide (equivalent to over $1 billion in today’s box office), and was nominated for eight Academy Awards, it was clear that Indy would be back. Sure enough, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade appeared in 1984 and 1989 respectively, grossing $348 million and $418 million worldwide. A television series, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, followed in 1992, which spanned Indy’s life from age ten, travelling with his father, to ninety-three — with an elderly, one-eyed Indy relating stories from his younger days at the beginning of each new episode. (Except for 1993’s Young Indiana Jones and the Mystery of the Blues, which featured a cameo from Harrison Ford, who took time off from filming The Fugitive to appear as a bearded, fifty year-old Indy in the story’s framing sequence.)