Is there anything more frustrating in this world than organizing a trip away? Even with -- actually, especially with -- the modern day "conveniences" of the internet, automatic phone bookings and fax facilities, it's an all-too-painful process that inevitably gets your hard-earned, well-deserved holiday off to a bad start.

Which is why a virtual vacation is such a great idea.

Total Recall's Doug Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger) likewise decided that the concept had some merit. (We have so much in common.) Doug, a denizen of the shining, gleaming future, is a construction worker harboring a near-obsession with Mars. He's almost movie studio-like in his fixation. His wife Lori (Sharon Stone), somewhat suspiciously I would have thought, denies him his wish to visit the Red Planet and distracts him with sex (that bitch), so he takes himself to a bizarre hybrid of video arcade and dentist's office in order to go there the artificial way.

It is there, at Rekall Inc., where it all begins to go horribly wrong for poor Doug, and the movie's plot commences. 'Cause it so happens that our Doug was not always the happy jackhammer-wielding, Earth-dwelling husband that he believed himself to be. No, before his mind was altered by some nefarious, shadowy "them," he was a spy on Mars, and the holiday "memories" being implanted onto the scrapbook of his mind trigger within him actual memories of his former life. When the "them" bad guys find out about this (those bastards are watching everything -- yes, they even know you're reading this review right now), they decide to keep him in the dark about himself by, well, trying to kill him, but he escapes their wily clutches, makes it to Mars, and eventually meets up with the babe. Not the blond Sharon Stone-shaped one (who is, as it turns out, evil -- my suspicions confirmed! -- and gets killed as all evil-doers should), but the dark-haired hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold one, Melina (Rachel Ticotin), that we all knew would be along soon. She puts Doug in touch with the Martian underground movement, such as it is, and together they defeat the oppressive overlords of the hostile planet's dome-controlled life and make the planet safe for democracy... and also, breathing.

Lots of car chases, gun fights and fisticuffs happen in the middle there, but that's basically it. And it's cool. It's the best science fiction movie on the Schwarzenegger resumé, with special effects of a many and varied nature, excellent self-propelled taxi cabs that we have got to get happening, and I mentioned the gun fights, yes?

All in all, a satisfying intra-stellar romp with enough plot twists and turns to keep you guessing, enough faithfulness to Philip K. Dick's original story “We Can Remember it for You Wholesale” to please all but the most exacting, and enough attention to the conventions of the genre to make you feel like it's actually something completely new. Director Paul Verhoeven, pre-the unfairly maligned Starship Troopers (and the very-fairly-maligned Show Girls), tells here a great tale, and despite the Total Recall 2070 debacle that would follow it, this still goes down as a classic genre film of the 1990's.

   -- Rachel Hyland