Rated: 4/5

“This your first trip?”
“Mhm.”
“Well don’t worry, things hardly ever fuck up around here.”

Ah, this movie never ceases to entertain me. For multiple reasons. You watch this initially (with a naïve 90’s youthful mindset), you view it a certain way, like you would Starship Troopers. Fun action scenes. A guy who has been brainwashed to believe he’s a normal average Joe, but he’s really a secret agent who has been a pawn of corporate interests to help enslave the minorities on a planet, and manages to reform himself (having his alternative mindset) and demolish the corporate overlords and save the planet and its inhabitants who were under the corporate bootheels. And you get some fun one-liners, satire, and action along the way.

Of course, there’s the other aspect to it. The aspect that would deem this film to be anti-white. Because he has a smoking hot white blonde wife, who turns out to be a bitch; so he gets his true love, who is a black woman (well… of black descent). Granted, it does have a black character being a villain who is disposed of, but the cons outweigh the pros (something not to forget even if the standards here aren’t as low as what we get today). You must intermix/intermarry racially.

The alternative way being that this isn’t that straightforward. Or it is, but not in the way you think. That sequence where this agent enters the hotel room telling Quaid that he’s living in a delusion that he needs to wake up from before he suffers a permanent mental breakdown which will result in him being lobotomized. Because all the stuff that happens once he passes out at Recall… is a dream. As implied with the last lines of the film.

“I can’t believe it, it’s like a dream. What’s wrong?”
“I just had a terrible thought. What if this is a dream?”
“Well then kiss me quick before you wake up.”

If you take the viewpoint that it was all a dream, then the film’s message becomes something else entirely. Dare I say, pro-white. Because if we are to go with the theory that it was a dream, what of the colored love interest (Melina)? What about his dream of her on Mars at the start of the film? Well… that begs the other question. What about her image being at Recall just before he goes under? The fact that her image was used at Recall implies that this actress/model was used elsewhere in advertising. Thus Quaid could have seen her in an advertisement before, and fell in love with the idea of her. Just like he fell in love with the idea of liberating Mars from the corporation oppressing it… as depicted in news headlines (ie media advertising).

Starting to see a pattern here? That Quaid became disillusioned with regard to his current status in life. That he is destined for more than having a decent blue-collar job, decent co-workers, and a smoking hot wife, because the advertisements around him influence him into becoming a bleeding-heart liberal who is encouraged to racially intermix. So he goes to Recall because he is so obsessed with this fantasy he has in his head which he has already confused with reality before entering this place that tricks his mind into believing he’s a secret agent, which he already has convinced himself that he is, subconsciously. He was already bordering on being a lost cause from the start of the film, which was pissing his wife off. And in order to justify the path he chose for living out his fantasy, he had to make villains out of those closest to him, his wife and his co-worker. And he kills them both in his dream. Being willing to turn on friends and family for a cause that isn’t even real, because the advertisements, let alone the corporate entity Recall itself, convinces individuals that it’s real (or real enough).

“One minute you’ll be the savior of the rebel cause. And the next thing you know, you’ll be Cohaagen’s butt-buddy!”

Further evidence lending credence to this theory is that everything the individual says, who offers Quaid the red pill, regarding what would happen if Quaid shot him instead of taking the pill. It all happened. Everything that he said would happen as a result of Quaid making that decision instead of taking the red pill (and waking up back into reality, something The Matrix was inspired by) ended up happening. This also backs up the idea that the Recall corporation has been known to make fuck-ups in the past that resulted in customers getting lobotomized (which happens to Quaid, the sun shining through the clouds at the end reflecting his head being opened up and forcefully ending the dream permanently). So they’re trying to cover their asses and prevent another customer from suffering that fate so that can maintain a decent enough reputation with the public, or at least not have to make an effort to keep the incident on the down-low like the previous one(s).

This is the message of the film, the dangers of selling you a dream, and what repercussions can be had for buying into it at the expense of what is real. While living in a fantasy can offer a nice distraction from the stress and annoyances of reality, the danger is not being able to live in (let alone come back to) reality. Far deeper and complex of a message than the alternative viewpoint that everything that happened was the real thing.

“He’s not going to want to come back.”
“That’s for sure.”

PS: If one was to stretch a bit and take another meaning from this, it’s that Quaid is also subconsciously aware that what he is doing is wrong when it comes to choosing Melina over Lori (his wife). Because he kills off a black character who is also a mutant, who should theoretically be helping other mutants, but sells out and because a race-traitor (of sorts, if mutants can be classified as a race, which is a stretch given that they’re likely this way due to side-effects of being on Mars and working in certain positions that expose them to substances that can cause mutations; but on the other hand, we only see this via Quaid’s dream, ie his assumption of what’s going on on Mars based on how he perceives the news he watches regarding events on that planet). So killing off the race-traitor his is way of making him feel better about himself hypocritically. You know, him choosing to be a race traitor and choosing a darky over a whitey. But, naturally, it should be hypocritical, since he’s also embracing the white savior complex in a manner similar to what many brainwashed whites embrace today due to brainwashing and media advertising (let alone schooling). You have to be a hypocrite to hold such a position for justifying racial mixing.