Marty’s Media Roundup – January 2019

FILM – TOTAL RECALL (2012)

Yes, I saw this film years after release.

Total Recall is the story of Quaid, a factory worker who has (troubling) dreams of being a secret agent.  Bored with his existence, he visits a company called Rekall to have some fantasy secret agent memories implanted.  During the procedure the Rekall workers discover he already has some real secret agent memories locked away in his head and the procedure goes awry.  The cops burst in, things get messy a Quaid sets off to discover what is really going on. Is he an agent? A double agent? Why is his wife suddenly trying to kill him?  This and more are unravelled over the course of the film.

The film is the remake of the better 1990 release.  Apparently the early film is based on the book of the same name, and all are inspired by the book We can Remember it for you wholesale by Phillip K Dick.

Overall, the film has some visually striking scenes, however I felt didn’t live up to the original release.

There are some cool set-pieces and the props and costuming are well conceived, if not particularly groundbreaking.  The weapons, armour and cars look cool, they just don’t stand out amongst their peers in the genre.  The hover cars would make nice miniatures.

The most novel prop in the film was the ‘hand phone’, an implant in your hand that allows you to communicate and when you press your palm to a glass object it projects a visual interface onto the glass.  It’s pretty cool and well executed in the film. The implants removal looks… painful. The removed implant might make a nice replica, however there isn’t much else in the film of interest to me.

The hand phone

https://chesamel.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Total-Recall-Implanted-hand-phone.jpg

https://i1.wp.com/ilikeinterfaces.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/00_40_0700188.png?ssl=1

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FILM – THE BOOK OF ELI (2010)

Another film ticked off my list.

The Book of Eli is the story of Eli, best summed up on Wikipedia:

Eli, ‘a nomad in a post-apocalyptic world, who is told by a voice to deliver his copy of a mysterious book to a safe location on the West Coast of the United States. The history of the post-war world is explained along the way, as is the importance of Eli’s task’.

I’m not entirely sure why I wanted to watch this, as I knew very little about it.  I guess the post-apocalyptic vibes and Denzel Washington drew me in. In the end I found it an average film, perhaps because I was watching it 8 years after release and the themes are pretty common.

The wasteland is similar to other wastelands, the costumes, weapons and props aren’t particularly unique which I suppose is to be expected given they are all built from found objects after the apocalypse.  However, there is this set of glasses from the Engineer character.

Source: http://www.icollector.com/The-Book-of-Eli-Engineer-Tom-Waits-Magnification-Movie-Props_i9405556