Total Recall (15)

Produced at a moment when the Hollywood studio system could still accommodate visionary spectacle on a blockbuster scale, Total Recall brought together Paul Verhoeven at the height of his provocative powers with Arnold Schwarzenegger, then the world’s pre-eminent action star, for an exuberantly expansive adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s short story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale. Verhoeven embraces the material’s destabilising questions of memory, identity and reality without sacrificing its visceral appeal, resulting in a film that fuses high-concept science fiction with gleefully excessive action. Anchored by one of Jerry Goldsmith’s most thunderously accomplished scores—at once martial, propulsive and richly atmospheric—the film hurtles from one indelible set piece to the next: the infamous nasal tracker, Sharon Stone’s breakthrough collaboration with Verhoeven, extravagant bursts of cartoon violence, the unforgettable three-breasted Martian sex worker and a seemingly endless supply of quotable dialogue, all combining to create one of the defining Hollywood spectacles of the 1990s.