Tag Archives: Paul Verhoeven

Total Recall (1990) | Paul Verhoeven



Set on Earth of the future, where we’ve already mastered the ability for space travel to through the solar system, and even set up colonies on Mars, Total Recall surrounds a lowly construction worker named Douglas Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger), who has recently been plagued by a recurring dream of being on Mars.  His doting wife (Sharon Stone) tells Doug it’s just a dream, but there’s something in the events of the dreams that makes him curious to find out more about the red planet.  Seeing an advertisement for a company called Rekall, an establishment that will implant the memory of vacation into the mind in vivid and perfect detail, Doug decides to choose the “secret agent” package set on Mars. 

No sooner than the implanted thoughts enter his head, Doug finds himself in what he perceives to be a real-life espionage drama involving himself and his role in a Martian underground society of spies, all seeking to end the stranglehold of a megalomaniac corporate businessman named Cohaagen (Ronny Cox).  Fighting for his life, Doug makes his way to Mars to try to uncover the secret to who he really is, but not everything is what it seems to be, both on Mars and in his mind.

Paul Verhoeven directs.


RoboCop (1987) | Paul Verhoeven



RoboCop is set in near-future Detroit, where the city streets are just about completely dominated by the criminal element, while the police are neither respected nor welcome; they are virtually walking targets out there.  Desperate to clean up the crime-ridden community and build a gleaming new one in its place, the government officials turn to OCP, Omni Consumer Products, to build and manufacture the future of law enforcement, robotic police that are more powerful and well-armed than anything anyone has ever seen.  However, when the first prototypes prove inconsistent, the city officials balk at the idea, so an upstart faction within the OCP comes up with a newer, more “human” cop, a cyborg built using the remnant body of downed officer Alex Murphy (Peter Weller), and dubbed simply as “RoboCop”.Things proceed splendidly for the RoboCop program, that is, until the human side of the cyborg begins to recollect his past life as Murphy, plagued with flashbacks to the family he lost and the psychopathic criminals who all but ended his life as he knew it.  Determined to bring the bad guys that did him in to justice, RoboCop sets out on a mission of his own, not realizing that the gang in question is actually in cahoots with a rogue entity within the OCP, who for all intents and purposes, also own the city, the police department, and the machine side of Murphy. Paul Verhoeven directs this scathing and potent satire on American commercialism and privatization.