<h1>The unchanging future, the eternal cyberpunk</h1>
If a film can elicit endless arguments from the audience, then the film is already half successful, such as the unsolved gyro at the end of "Inception", which leads the realists and dreamers into a vortex of controversy; "Confinement Island" does not give a clear answer to the ending, the therapeutic theory and conspiracy theory have been debated for many years, and has not been able to discuss a unified ending; and the infinite looping ending of "Horror Cruise Ship" leads the shipwrecks and car accident factions into an endless war of words.
And "Total Memories" and "Inception" the ending is as cunning, the director deliberately gives an open-ended ending, the dream and reality do not give a precise mark, if you do not watch the director's cut version, you will really fall into an endless chain of suspicion about the ending.
There are three versions of Total Recall: the 1990 version of Total Recall, the 1999 episode Total Recall 2070, and the 2012 version of Total Recall.
All three editions of the film and television productions are produced by Philip P. K. Dick's adaptation of the science fiction novel "Memory Company", although this science fiction novelist has no far-reaching influence of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, but has been appreciated by writers such as Robert Heinlein, can be called a pioneer of cyberpunk fantasy works, and at least seven novels have been transformed into film and television works.
The well-known "Blade Runner" and "Blade Runner 2049" are adapted from his novel "Will Bionic People Dream of Electronic Sheep?" "Total Memory" The city with a strong cyberpunk texture is completely a review of "Blade Runner", which can be seen from the same family of scripts, and even the form of the film adaptation is the same way.
Among them, the American dramas "High Castle Strange Man 1-3", "Foreseeing the Future", "Memory Rift", "Destiny Planning Bureau", "Minority Report", etc. are adapted from his science fiction novels, which is enough to see that Philippe's proficiency in the creation of "future" themes is unmatched by ordinary writers, and the cornerstone of his fantasy is the philosophy of "dystopian".
The mainstream worldview of his works is that the more avant-garde the technology, the more it will lead mankind to the abyss, because those technologies beyond the control of human beings, in addition to bringing threats to human beings themselves, will make the original solidified stratum of society more solid, and usher in new social problems, either serious polarization between rich and poor, or colonization and exploitation, "Comprehensive Remembrance" is obviously the latter.
<h1>Disassembling forms, deconstructing ideas</h1>
"Total Memory" is really far from "Inception" and "Ghost in the Shell" for the public, and the author privately thinks that the science fiction concept in this movie is equivalent to the latter two, but the overall completion of the work is inferior to the latter two. "Total Memories" is actually a synthesis of all the science fiction elements and ideological structure of Blade Runner, Inception, The Matrix, Mechanical Enemy, Ghost in the Shell, and Cannon of the Earth.
Urban concept design consistent with Blade Runner: mixed cities, layered cities, megacities.
In the worldview of traditional cyberpunk films, the concept of the state has been weakened to the point of no sense of existence, and the real domination of the world is the interest subjects of those who are allied with transnational groups, because the private ownership of capitalist society has been extreme, so it is not surprising to see the mixed urban style of Japanese, Korean, and Hong Kong elements in the Western world, because the world has only two classes, the lower class and the upper class, and the rest of the intermediate transitional class has long been replaced by robots and intelligent systems.
People not only in the ideological binary division of individual identity hierarchy, the city's residential areas are also gradually designed into duality, the upper society and the lower society of the city is also separated, we observe the "comprehensive memory" of the hierarchical urban composition, in the giant city, the traffic is divided by high-rise overpasses, the lower layer is the poor dirty and messy living area, the upper level is the paradise of mainstream society, the city of this structure itself is a class metaphor, the traffic used in the upper city is basically a flying car, and the bottom city is almost a robot to maintain law and order, Because the benefits generated by the city can no longer provide for its own maintenance.
A similar concept of dream layering to Inception: gyroscopes and seals are markers of dream discrimination
"Inception" is a kind of dream hierarchy, including the lost domain and the real space including a total of five layers of world, Nolan in order to distinguish reality and dreams using the gyroscope to divide the two, the gyroscope always rotates means in the dream, the gyro if it stops rotating means in reality, but the ending in the gyroscope swings irregularly, cutting off the camera, introducing the audience into a protracted hot discussion.
In "Total Memory", because people's memories are easily tampered with, people in the future world are prone to doubt reality, not only the protagonist cannot distinguish between the fantasy world and the real world, but also the audience is difficult to distinguish between dreams and reality, so Lico Company stamped a semi-permanent tattoo when injecting memories into customers, but the cunning director also deliberately cut the close-up of the stamp at the end.
A virtual world similar to The Matrix: speculation about the virtual and the real
"The Matrix" divides the world into three parts: Zion, the matrix, and the railway station, the railway station is the bridge between the virtual world and the real world, the matrix is the virtual world where human consciousness resides, the first part of the film is to speculate about the relationship between reality and virtuality, even if the people in the virtual world know that they are in the matrix world, they are willing to stay in the virtual world, and the Neo team also has mutants who want to return to the virtual world from reality.
"Total Memory" protagonist in the fantasy world, but also can not distinguish the reality, this scene is the most speculative classic scene in the whole film, the secret agent, friends, lovers form a solid triangle relationship, friends and lovers are competing for control of the protagonist's thoughts, the former is the agent of the real world, the latter is the agent of the virtual world, the protagonist's thoughts swing back and forth between the virtual and reality, but here is still based on the speculation in the second layer of the story.
"Mechanical Enemy" fits the concept of robots: the core of autonomous judgment of killing, the same design concept
"Mechanical Enemy" is adapted from Asimov's short story collection "I, Robot", in fact, the original book includes five major types of robots: dumb robots, ring dance robots, skeptical robots, lying robots, bionic robots, etc. The 2004 film version shows the appearance concept of two robots, the simplest is the white appearance concept of the robot, and the robot of the future world of "Full Name Memories" directly follows this appearance concept. At the same time, all robots have real-time communication capabilities and independent judgment of killing decisions.
The same memory transplantation as Ghost in the Shell: the same postmodern philosophy's critique of human subjectivity, the falsification of memory.
In the 95th edition of "Ghost in the Shell" Shaosa and the puppet master memory merged together to produce a new type of life body, which is a deep criticism of human subjectivity, as the human subject body is no longer unique, the real subject is actually the human will, and the external object form is to complete the memory merger through intubation. And "Total Memory" Li Gao Company directly saves the protagonist's original memory, under the action of chemicals, the protagonist can not extricate himself from the identity of saving the world by immersing himself in false memories.
It is consistent with the geocentric car envisioned by "Earth Cannon": the scientific basis of simple and harmonious movement, the brain hole of the tunnel at both ends of the earth
Liu Cixin's "Earth Cannon" was published in 2014, and the comprehensive memory was already available in 1990, so the concept of the geocentric car proposed by the two works is largely borrowed by Liu from the concept of "Comprehensive Memory".
Geocentric car is exercised in the earth tunnel through the center of the earth, if you ignore the role of friction, the whole process is a simple and harmonious movement, almost no energy consumption, in the process of the geocentric car to reach the center of the earth, gravity acceleration G is reduced from 10 to 0 process, the whole process is accelerated movement, when reaching the center of the earth, the speed reaches the maximum, gravity acceleration is zero, because the distance between the car and the center of gravity is zero, through the center of gravity is a weightless state, the film is also very reasonable, from the center of gravity to the surface is a deceleration process, the former is the complete opposite.
<h1>Confusing dreams</h1>
At the beginning of the movie, the male protagonist has a dream, he and his lover are secret agents in the colony, in order to cover the escape of the lover, he himself was captured. The background of the story of the whole film is the distant future, the earth is divided into two regions, one end is the British Union (chaebol organization), the other end is the colony, and the male protagonist is just an ordinary worker in the British Union area, the intention of the dream of the opening film is very clear, this dream is his subconscious desire, in his subconscious has always had the ideal of wanting to be a secret agent.
So later when the fantasy nervous system was activated by Li Gao Company, the first dream was the cornerstone of his fantasy, and all the fantasy space to save the world was his most primitive instinctive desire, so the chemicals injected into the male protagonist's body only intensified the floodgates of the dream, and he could become a spy between the two sides, which was the person he wanted to become.
The best design of the film is to seamlessly connect the interface between dream and reality, deceiving all the audience, when the drug is pushed, the male protagonist in the dream is actually still sitting on the chair of Li Gao Company, just before the injection of drugs, and the seamless editing here just stitches the dream and reality together.
Until the end, the protagonist can't get out of the dream, but he realizes that he is in the dream. Li Gao company to inject hallucinogens to the male protagonist, deliberately stamped a tattoo as a mark of reality, that is, the male protagonist without a tattoo mark is in the dream, when the male protagonist was stunned by the bomb, the male protagonist came up with a dialogue between Li Gao company and him, after waking up, the audience thought that he really returned to reality, but when he unveiled the gauze on his arm, there was no seal tattoo, when the lover also asked him what was wrong,
He smiled as he looked at the undemolished Li gao company in the distance, realizing that he had always been in a dream, and saving the world was all his own fantasy, ready to enter the second layer of the story.
All in all, the only flaw in this movie is the flood of action shots, as a dystopian science fiction film, what really needs to give the audience is ideological enlightenment, not endless fighting posing, after all, this is not a spy movie, but what is really meant is the contradiction between virtual and reality. The overall visual perception of the movie is not bad, and the science fiction elements in it can fully meet the needs of a science fiction fan, in addition to which the heroine and the female supporting actress look too similar, which is easy for the audience to cause errors in judgment.
When the future technology becomes omnipotent, our lives are highly controlled by technology, and the most vigilant thing for human beings is not the subverted social order, but the increasingly weak human nature.