Who else thought Cohaggen (Ronny Cox) looked just like Rodney Dangerfield when he suffering on Mars?
A question about Total Recall.
- Thread starter EmmanuelZorg
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MeanJoePhaser
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So I tell my wife "Quaid wants me to give those people air". And she says to me "I need air, too." Then she divorces me! No respect, I tell ya!
That guy Kuato...they say the Resistance thinks he's fucking George Washington. I told them, "no way, George Washington wasn't gay and he's been dead for hundreds of years!"
No respect for the dead, I tell ya!
That guy Kuato...they say the Resistance thinks he's fucking George Washington. I told them, "no way, George Washington wasn't gay and he's been dead for hundreds of years!"
No respect for the dead, I tell ya!
The "effect" is intended to be the lower air pressure effecting them it "reverses" itself only because normal airpressure eliminated to supposed stresses on the body.
I don't think they were trying to imply that Mars' atmosphere was turning them into the "mutants."
After their faces did what they did, there's no going back to normal.
It should have taken quite a bit longer for the introduction of more air into the atmosphere to have any kind of effect. Quaid and Melina would have been dead before it would have worked.
That's like saying that after the contortions your face goes through during an intense round of vomiting are permanent.
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It depends on what you were drinking, really.
Right. It was clearly a fanciful representation of "explosive decompression" -- the myth that being exposed to vacuum causes a human being to swell up and explode from internal pressure. Whereas some movies such as Outland depicted this as an instantaneous water-balloon kind of thing, Total Recall went for a more gradual "inflation" to the point of bursting.
Both are unmitigated rubbish, of course; the body's membranes are more robust than that. The "explosive" part doesn't mean people blow up; it just means that when a pressurized volume of air is exposed to vacuum, the air escapes in a single forceful burst. But it escapes through the available openings, it doesn't push out in all directions. If you're exposed to vacuum, the air in your lungs will burst out through your nose and mouth (so long as you don't foolishly try to hold your breath and risk rupturing your alveoli from the pressure). Also any gas in the digestive tract would explosively decompress from, err, both ends. But the body's membranes are strong enough to hold in the fluid pressure of its innards against vacuum (or against the 0.01 atm surface pressure on Mars). A few surface capillaries might rupture, but that's about it. Being out on the surface of Mars without pressure gear would cause suffocation, desiccation, frostbite, and other nasty things, but nobody would swell up like Augustus Gloop.
Yep, somewhat bizarrely the most realistic depiction of exposure to vacuum is probably the one in Event Horizon...
I've come to think of Quaid's trip to Mars as a dream anyway. You're basically watching a Hollywood movie within a Hollywood movie. In which case bursting eye balls make perfect sense.
I tend to interpret it as a dream too, and not just for that. Even stupider than the "explosive decompression" is the notion of Mars as a rocky planet with an icy core. That's like a boulder floating on a lake. It would never happen. Rock is denser than ice, so it would sink to the core and the ice would be on the surface.
Yes, that movie actually did its homework, which is why I kind of like it. It's exceptionally accurate, not only in that regard, but in terms of its planetary science, the physics of spaceflight, etc. I can even somewhat excuse the more seemingly mystical stuff, since it's justified as an aspect of another universe with different physical laws. It's possible that if another universe's laws of physics and causality were sufficiently different, we might find it unbearably disturbing to be exposed to it and it would seem like Hell.
Speaking of Total Recall, I see Columbia has announced that Kurt Wimmer is remaking it...
(Sighs)
I love that movie- Anderson's best, by a long long way. If only he'd kept up with this kind of flick instead of videogame adaptations
If your face looks like that when you vomit then you've got problems. Most people's eyeballs don't pop out from their eye sockets when they hurl.
The one sci-fi show I saw to get the "What happens to you in space" thing mostly right was Farscape. The "Princess" trilogy where he expelled all air from his lungs, kept all his major orifices open and managed to get from one ship to another in vacuum. He needed reconstructive surgery afterwards, just to show you can't go through vacuum and be okay even if you follow the "expell all air" rule.
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