FAQ

They were lovers but worked together, and Lori's work was to be with Quaid.

Because Minority Report isn't a sequel to Total Recall?

After signing up at Rekall Inc. for a memory implant of the perfect vacation on Mars and discovering that the life he is currently living is actually a lie, construction worker Douglas Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger) goes to the Mars colony in search of answers and learns that he is actually a renegade Intelligence agent called Hauser. Aided by Hauser's lover Melina (Rachel Ticotin), a member of a band of freedom fighters fighting to free Mars from the oppressive rule of Hauser's former boss, corrupt administrator Vilos Cohaggen (Ronny Cox), Quaid sets out to stop Cohaggen and save Mars. But Quaid soon begins to question reality and wonders whether everything happening to him is real or just a virtual memory instilled in him by an implant gone wrong.

Total Recall is loosely based on a short story, "We Can Remember it for You Wholesale", by American novelist Philip K. Dick and first published in the April 1966 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. The short story was adapted for the screen by American screenwriters Ronald Shusett, Dan O'Bannon, Gary Goldman, and Jon Povill.

The book is very serious and the film is an entertaining action Arnie movie. What's surprising about "We Can Remember it for You Wholesale" is how close it is to Total Recall, at least up to a point. Both the story and the movie follow Douglas Quail (story)/Quaid (film), an everyday married guy who is inexplicably drawn to Mars. Realizing that he'll never be able to go to the planet in person, Quaid visits the offices of Rekall, Incorporated (traveling there and back in a taxi driven by a robot as in the film), where he elects to undergo a process that will insert the memories of a trip to Mars into his brain a trip where he adopts the role of a secret agent. Trouble is, before the process can even begin, Rekall's technicians discover that those memories already exist in Quaid's mind: he is a secret agent, and he did go to Mars. Having now remembered his other life, Quaid finds himself pursued by shadowy security forces intent on killing him.

Where the short story and the movie part ways is directly after this point. In the film, Quaid/Arnie heads off to Mars and gets involved in a Martian revolution. All of that was bolted on to Dick's story by Verhoeven and his writers, Dan O'Bannon et al; Dick's tale ends with Quail striking a deal: he returns to Rekall voluntarily to avoid being killed, agreeing to have his mind once again wiped, and have one of his outlandish fantasies implanted as a memory, overriding the secret agent/Mars one: Quail will receive memories of having saved Mars from an alien invasion when he was a child. This leads to a nice twist that's even more insane than what's gone before: when the Rekall technicians try to implement this memory, they find that he has already and genuinely experienced this as a child. But although the story and the movie diverge here, prior to this juncture they run along remarkably similar lines, right down to those robot taxis.

The film was edited by the filmmakers to get an R rating, although it is unknown whether this footage exists anymore. Taken from the alternate versions section: Benny's death is optically cropped to remove the exiting drill erupting from his stomach, the innocent bystander used as a shield was bloodier before trimming, the stabbing of Helm in the bar had the Bowie knife slicing up his stomach. Stills of this were actually featured in Fangoria magazine at the time of the film's release, several shots of the scientists being killed by Quaid after he breaks free from the implant-machine were shortened, and the scene of Richter's arms being severed was shortened.

Sources say that Verhoeven, after his experience at the hands of the MPAA with RoboCop, deliberately shot Total Recall with more explicit violence than he was planning to put in the final cut. He submitted his more violent cut to the MPAA, they demanded cuts that lined up with what he was really intending to put in the film, and he cut it that way.

During the late 1990s, Jonathan Frakes was set to direct a sequel for Dimension Pictures but the budget eventually became too big. Although Arnold Schwarzenegger had not officially been signed on, Frakes did say he would make the film with or without him. When asked at a 2006 UK convention about any existing possibility that the sequel could still be made, Frakes optimistically replied, "maybe someday(!)". Frakes also agreed that one theory was that Minority Report (2001) was a sequel of sorts in that it was set in the same universe as Total Recall (1990) and that the three Precogs (from Minority Report) were in fact psychic mutants from Mars. In 1999, there was a television series named Total Recall 2070 was meant to be set in the same universe as Total Recall; however, the show had far more similarities with the Blade Runner movie (also inspired by a Philip K. Dick story) than Verhoeven's film. The two-hour series pilot, released in VHS and DVD for the North American market, borrowed footage from the film, such as the space cruiser arriving on Mars. There is a newer version of the film, based on the novel by Philip K. Dick, starring Colin Farrel as Quaid, Kate Beckinsale as Lori, Jessica Biel as Mileena and Bryan Cranston as Vilos Cohaagen that was released on August 3rd, 2012.

For a behind-the-scenes answer, it's because the filmmakers at the time had not thought of putting them in the film because, at the time of filming in 1989, mobile phone technology was still in the early stages of development and widespread adoption. At one point we see someone using a public phone to call with Doug, who is only a few yards away, so this would imply that mobile phones indeed do not exist in this future world (unless that person used a public phone out of fear of being traced or tapped).

In the context of the film, mobile phones may have fallen out of use as people began living on other planets. At its closest, Mars is four light-minutes from Earth. This distance would create such latency in the call that any real-time conversation would be next to useless. Instead it seems that people have switched to less mobile but longer range devices, such as that seen in the car which allows Richter and Cohaagen to communicate almost instantly from Earth to Mars. However, this wouldn't explain why so few characters use any kind of portable device to communicate with others locally (i.e., on the same planet). For whatever reason, such a manner of telecommunication is not a staple of the customs of the depicted futuristic societies. The same thing can be noticed in Trở Về Tương Lai Phần 2 (1989) when Marty McFly Jr. uses a payphone in 2015.

ANSWER: That's like asking about a Jules Verne novel about space travel (From the Earth to the Moon 1865), why there aren't any microwave ovens? A futuristic movie is based on whatever future is perceived from that point when it was written, and to fit the story, having nothing to do with the actual future and what THAT future holds.

ANSWER: Back To The Future part 2 which was also filmed in 1989, had a payphone (which MartyMcFly Jr. uses). Same explanation: Mobile phones were not anticipated (Radiotelephony 1918 Goldsmith) to be so widespread and the extinction of payphones was not forseen. That film also had hoverboards, which as of 2021, do not exist.