Watch Total Recall trailer with director's revealing commentary



The awesome trailer for Len Wiseman's upcoming Total Recall reboot already has us salivating, and now Wiseman has dished a few details in a nifty commentary clip breaking down some of the action.


The director sat down with MTV.com to talk about all the threads and scenes being showcased in the first trailer.


Wiseman said he wanted to keep one of the most iconic scenes from the 1990 original, the Rekall scene where Colin Farrell's Doug Quaid (the character portrayed by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the '90s version) has his memories mucked with.


"[We] set it up in a much more opium-den, slightly more sketchy version of this whole process," he said. "I wanted to have a little bit more danger. At its core, it's screwing with your brain chemistry. That cannot be a widely accepted thing."


As for that Jason Bourne-style fight scene against those generic-looking stormtroopers? Wiseman said he's wanted to shoot one of those for years, and Total Recall finally gave him the chance.


"I needed to have the audience feel what Quaid was feeling. I wanted to set up a moment where you aren't given a chance to take a breath until it's over, just like he would," he said. "It was a very complicated shoot where Colin had to do the fight 22 times, actually, to get the thing right with all of the cameras. The cameras would move at 35 miles an hour that were on computer systems. It took two days. It was immensely fun, but it is 100 percent practical."


You can watch the commentary trailer here.

Let’s talk about the good first, as the bad is plentiful. This is Wiseman’s most technically sound film to date, bringing to the screen a gorgeously dirty future that looks equal parts Blade Runner and Tron Legacy.
He stays far away from his usual Underworld gimmicks (the 3-D, the Matrix “bullet time” effects), and seems to realize that he is crafting something…special may be too strong a word, as is important; I suppose what I’m trying to say is, when Columbia Pictures gave him a $200 million dollar budget, he probably realized this wouldn’t be his own private little disposable playground, as the Underworld series has quickly devolved into.

The actors are almost all universally bad here. Sure, John Cho (the Harold & Kumar series) appears for a few minutes as the technician at Rekall, and Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad) appears to be having fun as Cohaagen, the evil ruler of the UF. After that we are left with Biel, who hasn’t appeared in a starring role in a major release in years, playing a top notch freedom fighter that seemingly can’t untie a knot without screaming for Quaid’s help and suffering a concussion.

Beckinsale plays her usual role of “beautiful woman in leather who kicks everyone’s ass for 2 hours”, chewing the scenery while her director husband shouts words of encouragement from behind the camera.

The huge problem here is Farrell. Yes, he was great in In Bruges, but how much goodwill can you continue to give a guy for one role? What we are given here is the Farrell of SWAT, a star in desperate need of charismatic support around him at all times.
Say what you will for Schwarzenegger, but at least he was fun to watch in the original. Farrell is the definition of vanilla acting; he won’t put in a horrible performance, but at certain points you are begging him to breathe life into the material. Crack a smile, develop a facial tic, appear to actually be bothered by the events going on around you, anything!

The only thing memorable about this film is that they managed to include a 3-breasted alien nude scene in a PG-13 film, giving geeky teens without the internet something to develop puberty to once this hits DVD. Other than that, it is a truly forgettable experience.