I'll always remember that summer when my mother took me to the book store on Bourke Street and I discovered Michael Marshall Smith's 'Only Forward'. To her delight, I started reading it in the store and burrowed my nose into it the whole tram ride home. It was a dreamlike sci-fi novel that encompassed the tropes of noir-fiction with the complexities of an ever-evolving landscape; I just couldn't put it down. It was a far cry from the Shakespeare tales I had yet to fully understand, and more sophisticated than the narratives found in the X-Men comics I was hoarding under my bed. I was a teenager enthralled in a new level of advanced fiction - what else out there was like this?
It was the days of dial-up internet, and a group of like-minded Usenet Newsgroup members were discussing the short story 'Minority Report' from a book called The Philip K Dick Reader. "Philip K Dick has an amazing body of work. If you love Science Fiction, his stories are the crème de la crème. Just read the first one - you'll see..." wrote one user. Scrolling up to the first page I saw the title "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" - sounds interesting enough. The first paragraph spoke of a man engrossed with the idea of going to Mars. This sounds vaguely familiar, I thought. I described the story to a mate and by some sort of alignment in the stars, he knew exactly what to prescribe. Later that week, he brought over a VHS copy of an Arnold Schwarzenegger picture I had somehow missed for several years. It was 1990s 'Total Recall' and he was ecstatic that I hadn't seen it yet.
A loose adaptation of the aforementioned short story, Director Paul Verhoeven's vision for Total Recall was outlandish with strokes of surrealism. For me, it shares a sensibility with Robocop (one of Verhoeven's earlier projects) and the visual effects were stunning and innovative. It wasn't Dick's story to the letter, but it encapsulated enough of the core elements to pass as something strongly inspired by the source material.
The special FX have nothing on today's standards, but their novelty is still very much married to the nostalgia one gets from the action/sci-fi flicks of the early 90s. When you consider the alternatives of 'Hardware' or even' The Lawnmower Man', you can really start to see the budget flexing its advantages. And it did pave way for creators to realise bigger worlds and more complex projects. In fact, 'Minority Report' got the full A-List treatment to glorious results and has aged well because of the attention to detail.
If you consider the screenplay was being worked on from as far back as the 70s but held off due to the expense of fully realising the special effects needed - it makes for quite a triumph. And being one of the first Hollywood films to use CGI, we can witness the birth of a new direction for the industry and the importance of illuminating this film's relevance.
It was the days of dial-up internet, and a group of like-minded Usenet Newsgroup members were discussing the short story 'Minority Report' from a book called The Philip K Dick Reader. "Philip K Dick has an amazing body of work. If you love Science Fiction, his stories are the crème de la crème. Just read the first one - you'll see..." wrote one user. Scrolling up to the first page I saw the title "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" - sounds interesting enough. The first paragraph spoke of a man engrossed with the idea of going to Mars. This sounds vaguely familiar, I thought. I described the story to a mate and by some sort of alignment in the stars, he knew exactly what to prescribe. Later that week, he brought over a VHS copy of an Arnold Schwarzenegger picture I had somehow missed for several years. It was 1990s 'Total Recall' and he was ecstatic that I hadn't seen it yet.
A loose adaptation of the aforementioned short story, Director Paul Verhoeven's vision for Total Recall was outlandish with strokes of surrealism. For me, it shares a sensibility with Robocop (one of Verhoeven's earlier projects) and the visual effects were stunning and innovative. It wasn't Dick's story to the letter, but it encapsulated enough of the core elements to pass as something strongly inspired by the source material.
The special FX have nothing on today's standards, but their novelty is still very much married to the nostalgia one gets from the action/sci-fi flicks of the early 90s. When you consider the alternatives of 'Hardware' or even' The Lawnmower Man', you can really start to see the budget flexing its advantages. And it did pave way for creators to realise bigger worlds and more complex projects. In fact, 'Minority Report' got the full A-List treatment to glorious results and has aged well because of the attention to detail.
If you consider the screenplay was being worked on from as far back as the 70s but held off due to the expense of fully realising the special effects needed - it makes for quite a triumph. And being one of the first Hollywood films to use CGI, we can witness the birth of a new direction for the industry and the importance of illuminating this film's relevance.
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