Total Recall

Total Recall is the greatest Philip K. Dick adaptation that actually feels like a Philip K. Dick story — a mind-bending action film where reality itself is unreliable and the hero might be the villain of his own fantasy. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Douglas Quaid, a construction worker who visits Rekall to have fake memories of a Mars vacation implanted — only to discover that his entire life may already be a fabrication. Is he a secret agent? Is it all a dream? Verhoeven refuses to answer.

The Mars sequences are gloriously excessive — mutant rebels, alien reactors, bulging eyeballs in vacuum, and Sharon Stone as a wife who is definitely going to try to kill you. Verhoeven's satirical edge is razor-sharp beneath the action spectacle. The practical effects — the fat-lady disguise, the three-breasted woman, the Mars terraforming — remain more convincing than most modern CGI. Total Recall works simultaneously as a muscular action film, a philosophical puzzle, and a savage satire of capitalism's colonization of everything, including your own mind.