Colin Farrell's Remake Of A Classic '90s Sci-Fi Movie Is A Prime Video Streaming Hit

Len Wiseman's "Total Recall" released in August 2012, and neither critics nor audiences were very kind to it. But fourteen years after Colin Farrell and Kate Beckinsale starred in this failed remake of a '90s sci-fi movie classic, it's doing a lot better on Prime Video. In fact, at the time of writing, the movie was even appearing in Prime Video's Top 10 in the U.S.

Wiseman's "Total Recall" is a remake of the original 1990 movie, and while there are some changes to how it plays out, the setup is still mostly the same. Colin Farrell plays Douglas Quaid, a man who's grown so tired of his life that he goes to Rekall to have the memories of a secret agent put into his head. However, everything quickly goes wrong when Rekall realizes that Quaid already has memories hidden in his mind.

Armed with combat instincts and searching for answers, Quaid soon sets off on a journey to figure out who he is and why his memories have been repressed. The movie is based on Philip K. Dick's short story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale," and the 1990 version is still one of the more mind-bending sci-fi movies based on classic short stories. While the remake is clearly inspired by the 1990 movie from Paul Verhoeven, it does include some pretty big changes to the story overall, including the blending of two characters from the original film.

One of the biggest differences between the "Total Recall" remake and the original 1990 film, one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's best sci-fi movies, is the fact that the original movie's Quaid is a construction worker who dreams about Mars every night, eventually leading him to travel there.

However, Wiseman's remake doesn't go to Mars at all. Instead, much of it takes place in the limited places that the Earth offers livable conditions, with some portions taking place in the Earth's core. Quaid is also not a construction worker, but instead works in a factory building police droids.

Aside from that, though, the movie does a pretty good job of sticking to the same plot beats as the original, with the other big deviation being the fact that Quaid's fake wife, Lori, is treated as less of a handler that simply passes off the issue to someone else, and more as the primary antagonist.

In the 1990 movie, Sharon Stone's Lori is only pretending to be Quaid's wife. Then, once he returns home talking about Rekall, she calls up Richter, played by Michael Ironside, to come and bring him in. However, in the remake, writers Kurt Wimmer and Mark Bomback did away with Richter as a character, instead folding his role into Lori's. This made Lori more of an active participant in the film's plot, and Kate Beckinsale, who plays Lori in the remake, said that this was her first time actually playing a bad guy onscreen. While this ended up being a major role for her, Beckinsale's appearance in the film was almost smaller.

At the time of the film's making, Wiseman was actually married to Beckinsale, and at one point he had thought about putting her in the movie for a cameo as the movie's iconic three-breasted woman. Luckily, that isn't how things played out, and we ended up with the remake we have today.

In a 2012 interview, Beckinsale said they talked about why Lori acts the way she does early on, because she felt that having a bad guy that's simply bad for no reason was one of the most boring choices that writers and directors could make. The way she sees it, Lori is one of the best officers Cohaagen has, and she got stuck sharing a bed with and making dinner for a factory worker, which Beckinsale called "actually quite degrading, if you think about it." The anger and frustration that the character must feel about that shows throughout Beckinsale's performance. "Total Recall" is streaming on Prime Video now, and there's even an unrated director's cut with 16 more minutes if you want to rent or buy it.