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Total Recall

2012 · Film · 118 min

Directed by Len Wiseman

ActionScience FictionThriller

Factory worker Doug Quaid takes a virtual mind-trip vacation with the Rekall company, opting for implanted memories of being a spy. When the procedure goes wrong, Quaid becomes a wanted man by the police and joins forces with a rebel fighter to stop the evil Chancellor Cohaagen.

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8 comments on Hacker News

  1. NeutralfreakynitApr 27, 2026

    Oh yea.. I remember that now...

    Mission "The Information" based on a tech named "Braindance".. Thanks for reminding me of this.. was a crazy experience the first time I played.

    This also now reminds me of Total Recall(2012) movie, especially that "Rekall" scene.

  2. NeutralwalterbellMay 21, 2024

    Perhaps the system's secure boot integrity process can confirm with a giant desktop visual indicator, whether Recall is disabled or enabled by policy.

    2003, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog

    > LifeLog was.. to be "an ontology-based (sub)system that captures, stores, and makes accessible the flow of one person's experience in and interactions with the world in order to support a broad spectrum of associates/assistants and other system capabilities". The objective of the LifeLog concept was "to be able to trace the 'threads' of an individual's life in terms of events, states, and relationships", and it has the ability to "take in all of a subject's experience, from phone numbers dialed and e-mail messages viewed to every breath taken, step made and place gone".

    2007 Microsoft Research, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/the-microsoft-sensecam-and-other-lifelogging-devices/

    > The SenseCam is a personal, wearable camera developed by Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, and used as a lifelogging device in projects like MyLifeBits.. is based on wearing the SenseCam for lifelogging of ‘events’ during your day, and generating a fast-forward movie of the event as the memory recall interface.

    2010 Microsoft Research, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/now-let-me-see-where-i-was-understanding-how-lifelogs-mediate-memory/

    > Lifelogging technologies can capture both mundane and important experiences in our daily lives, resulting in a rich record of the places we visit and the things we see.. Previous work has demonstrated that Lifelogs can aid recall, but that they do many other things too. They can help us look back at the past in new ways, or to reconstruct what we did in our lives, even if we don’t recall exact details. Here we extend the notion of Lifelogging to include locational information.

    https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/mylifebits/

    > MylifeBits is a lifetime store of everything. It is the fulfillment of Vannevar Bush’s 1945 Memex vision including full-text search, text & audio annotations, and hyperlinks. The book Total Recall.. is the culmination of our thoughts regarding MyLifebits and the larger CARPE research agenda .. Gordon Bell has captured a lifetime’s worth of articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings and stored them digitally. He is now paperless, and is beginning to capture phone calls, IM transcripts, television, and radio.

    HN ranking history for this thread: https://hnrankings.info/40433884/

  3. NegativeNeedMoreTeaJul 11, 2019

    It was interesting from 50+ years before I was born, through B&W B movies of the 50s, to maybe early 00s. Independent movies don't have the same absurd tendencies, and often still have lots of contrasts. Sure, some of those are just poor too. Independents have changed too, but haven't magically ended up with the same framework every time. Hollywood didn't used to.

    There were always derivatives, themes, fashions, but without dull homogeneity. Too much chasing what sells, I have no idea why, but it seems to have reached self parody with succession of predictable remakes that add the standards and take away what made the original interesting in the first place. e.g. Total Recall

    I still regularly find new bands and music. shrug.

  4. NeutralcrdbJun 7, 2017

    I'm going to take an unpopular stance here but I must disagree, at least to the extent that whilst details were done relatively well (although no better than, say, Total Recall's recent remake) the photography was not.

    Here's a simple example: the chase scene to the water [1] vs [2]. In the first, you have a whopping 3 layers of background, the white water, the dark slum, the city in the back (and perhaps an extra layer of city) giving the scene immensity and depth. Even the proportion in which these layers cut the screen (each increasing in height and implied size with distance) help give further depth. The main character is clearly contrasted (including earlier [3]) and thus easily followed, with the eye naturally falling upon the action.

    The drawing is neat and the spirit carries over to the sound: the fight is punctuated by long periods of silence both of the ear and of movement ("Music is the space between the notes." - Debussy - to say nothing of the enormous importance of empty space in both Chinese and Japanese art e.g. [5]).

    I'll let you take a look at the movie version and see if you can find an understanding of these elements.

    Here's an unrelated example of what I mean by the spirit being done well: [4]. Listen to both the steamroller-like momentum, and the way in which the lower voice emerge from the texture about halfway. It is actually incredibly difficult to play like this reliably despite the relative technical ease of the work, Gilels almost makes it sound like he took one, maybe two breaths only (a subtle change of texture splits the work).

    [1] http://www.mangauk.com/gallery/albums/album-19/lg/gits_124.png

    [2] http://sm.ign.com/t/ign_nordic/video/g/ghost-in-t/ghost-in-the-shell-water-fight-clip_en8r.640.jpg

    [3] http://images.static-bluray.com/reviews/10635_4.jpg - literally framed!

    [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu06WnXlPCY

    [5] http://www.theartwolf.com/landscapes/hasegawa-tohaku-pine-trees.htm

    More examples: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/yHfLyMAHrQE/maxresdefault.jpg

    http://thecabot.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/the-godfather-1.jpg

    https://a.ltrbxd.com/resized/sm/upload/bn/hi/lo/wd/yojimbo-1200-1200-675-675-crop-000000.jpg?k=092168c692

    http://moviemezzanine.com/wp-content/uploads/spirited-2.jpg

    http://i.imgur.com/DQuW037.jpg

    https://i.ytimg.com/vi/K0c2HJ4AO6o/maxresdefault.jpg

  5. NeutraljimnotgymJun 6, 2017

    Last night I watched the 'Total Recall' remake with he kids. I couldn't help making connections between the film and the way technological policing is progressing. I keep noticing that in dystopian sci-fi films there are far too many parallels with the UK. I should stop watching sci-fi and finish some coding...

  6. NeutralanigbrowlNov 15, 2014

    Hollywood is fond of conflict because that's where drama comes from, as observed by Aristotle a couple of millenia ago. Nobody is interested in a story where the protagonist doesn't have any problems, which is why there's a genral shortage of utopian literature in the first place: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_utopian_literature

    A good number of the films listed by Wikipedia as dystopian technology is working out just fine for most people while disenfranchising a few - much as in our own world. Insofar as dystopianism is aesthetically fashionable it's largely reflective of contemporary economic or political anxieties rather than being predicated on technology. Total recall (both versions) are listed as dystopian, for example, but those films are quite neutral on the impact of technology - the dystopian element is that of economic coercion resulting from a natural monopoly (oxygen on Mars in the original; the labor supply chain in the remake).

    I could dig into examples at length and compare them with positive and negative views of the future from earlier eras of film, but I'm not sure it would be worth the effort given your needlessly snide tone.

  7. Negativeeasy_riderMar 12, 2014

    Yes seriously, this was my first thought. The funny thing is that it isn't even dubstep. It is some kind of subgenre that seems to have been the trend for 2013/2014. It sounds like a microsoft surface commercial. I coined the term "clubstep" for it. Looks like someone beat me to it [1]. I've also noted an alarming trend in latest sci-fi movies with this awful music being portrayed still being the hottest thing in clubs decades from now (Total Recall 2).

    In all I would propose fire as a viable way to kill it with.

    [1] http://nl.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Clubstep

  8. PositivenicholasreedDec 26, 2012

    The two you need to watch:

    - Get the Gringo

    - Grabbers

    The rest:

    - Cloud Atlas was...interesting.

    - Pitch Perfect was the absolute worst, but hilarious. In a similar vein: For a Good Time, Call.

    - Argo and Beast of the Southern Wild are overhyped in my opinion.

    - Life of Pi was great (make sure to read the book at some point).

    - End of Watch was better than advertised.

    - Dark Knight Rises was a solid conclusion to the series.

    - Ted was funny, but doesn't work so well on repeat views.

    - Other movies you should watch: The new Total Recall. Safety Not Guaranteed. Lawless. The Amazing Spiderman (awesome series reboot)