Total Recall, 1990

Paul Verhoeven followed up RoboCop with this equally inventive sci-fi film, cementing himself as one of the most exciting directors in the genre at that point in time. Total Recall delivered all the action an Arnie fan could hope for, wrapped in some mindblowing questions of the sort that sci-fi is so great at posing. How well do we really know ourselves? How much do our memories matter? Does it matter if what we experience is real? “That’s a new one, blue skies on Mars” seems like a throwaway line when uttered by an attendant at Rekall, the memory implant service Douglas Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger) visits in the film, but it winds up being a reason for us to question everything that follows, a twisty, identity-bending odyssey that sees Quaid going to Mars and killing the corporate tyrant who has the planet in his grasp.

That’s all great, but what really makes the film exceptional is how fully realized the film’s vision of Mars is, packed with the kinds of unforgettable little details that suggest the production designers and filmmakers really thought through what Mars was like as a place. The fact that it all thrums with that signature, biting Verhoeven satire makes it endlessly enjoyable, and that stuff—like this scene in which Quaid must deal with an obnoxiously chipper, entirely useless taxi-driving robot—only feels more relevant as we find machines increasingly doing the work once done by people in ways that only make our lives worse. Oh, and if you think you remember a remake of this film starring Colin Farrell from 2012, you don’t. That was just a false memory we were all implanted with. —Carolyn Petit