Total Recall (2012) - A good film, only flawed by the original

Imagine a world where 1990 didn't happen. Then, some 22 years later, a sci-fi action film comes out where Colin Farrell plays a lowly construction worker who wakes up one morning to find out that he might be a spy and everyone is trying to kill him. Everyone would love it and hail it as a great film.
However, 1990 DID happen and, during that year, Arnold Schwarzenegger released Total Recall - a much loved sci-fi romp where he does all that and more.

Therefore, many people (including me) said, `Why are they bothering to remake it?'

To be fair, Colin Farrell's version isn't bad: it has great sets, great special effects, awesome chases and some nice ideas (more based on the original source material - short story by Phillip K Dick than Arnie's version was). However, its major drawback is a sense that we've seen it all before. Every now and again, you'll find a scene which is nearly word for word identical to the 1990 version and it keeps reminding you that you've actually seen this story before. I found this quite jarring.

It gets the action and tension right and plays the whole things straight - quite a major change from Arnie's `one-liners' and pulpy comic book feel to the original.

If you haven't seen the original and you like sci-fi, then you're definitely missing out. I think for those who might not have seen it yet, they'll appreciate Colin Farrell's version more. But this is a project that was always semi-doomed from the start. Schwarzenegger's version was always going to be too popular to completely match. Fair play for them for doing their best to go in a different direction, but I think this is one film that would actually benefit from NOT being called Total Recall.

It's a good film and it certainly doesn't deserve the typical scorn that most remakes automatically receive. However, I still think it comes back to the question, `Why did they bother?'

7/10 if I woke up on Groundhog Day and had to watch this again, I could live with that