Hollywood has done pretty well by Philip K. Dick. In an industry where works of literature rarely make the leap to the big screen unscathed, Dick's work has spawned not one but two impressive film adaptations -- "Blade Runner" (1982) and "Total Recall" (1990) -- and at least five other efforts are rumored or on the horizon.

"Adaptation" is the key word here. Neither film is a note-for-note retelling of the Dick story on which it is based, instead using these works as springboards for a bridge between Dick's very literary sensibilities and the demands of cinema. The end result is something different from the source material, yet still evocative of it.

For those unfamiliar with the film, here's the fifth-grade book report version: Haunted by recurring dreams of Mars, a construction worker named Doug Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger) decides to take a virtual vacation to the Red Planet by having "virtual" memories of the trip installed in his head. Something goes wrong, and Quaid learns that his blue-collar life is the real fantasy. He departs for Mars one step ahead of killers -- led by the oleaginously vicious Michael Ironside -- who want to stop him from revealing what they believe he knows.

Once on Mars, Quaid gets caught up in a plot -- which he himself possibly had a hand in devising -- to quell a rebellion and preserve the power and influence of the company that runs things on the Red Planet. He meets up with a few mutants and a requisite Love Interest (the same one he originally picked out at the virtual memory clinic) along the way, and after a series of fantastic shootouts and narrow escapes, Quaid learns the secret that lurks beneath the surface of Mars.

That is to say, these things "happen" if his adventures are real, and not simply the result the memory implantation process or, as the corporate agents claim, an adverse reaction.

Brave new planet, same old us
The Mars of "Total Recall" isn't the Final Frontier by any stretch of the imagination.

First, it's just dirty. Director Paul Verhoeven gave his Mars neither the orderly, ice-white sterility of a Stanley Kubrick future nor the ultra-convenient, socially idealized sensibilities of Star Trek. Despite the preponderance of glass and steel, the living conditions of the Martian colonists fall somewhere between an urban slum and a seedy mill town -- more like the Old West under glass than the sterile, hermetically-sealed utopias of more upscale SF.

The architecture aside, the technology is decidedly pedestrian. This Mars isn't a world of ray guns, jet packs and instantaneous teleportation, and Tom Swift would probably even be allowed to visit. It's a low-tech, low-brow world. Although the occasional fantastic device pops up -- the Recall machine and Quaid's various super-spy toys -- the technological extrapolations in "Total Recall" are decidedly utilitarian.

All of this combines to give the impression that Mars isn't a nice a place to visit, and you sure as heck wouldn't want to live there. Forbidding as this depiction seems, it does reinforce a level of realism not often seen in SF films. Humanity has left the cradle of Earth, but our worst impulses have hitched along for the ride.

Sold Mars' soul to the company store
In fact, these base impulses -- greed and powerlust -- provide the film's villains with their motivation for colonizing and developing the Red Planet. The human presence on Mars has nothing to do with benevolent exploration, but everything to do with the simple reason that there is a lot of money to be made there. The new world represents an untapped and unexploited source of mineral wealth.

Although the movie leaves most of the deeper astropolitical issues unaddressed, the mining operation on Mars suggests one of two things. Either someone found a way to get the mineral resources off the planet and back to Earth in a cheap and efficient manner -- as with the orbital elevator and its corresponding slingshot effect in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars -- or else the concept of Corporate Welfare is alive and well on Mars, and the cost of transporting profitable mineral resources is passed along to Terran taxpayers in the form of industrial subsidies. Given the general look and feel of the film, the latter option seems the more plausible.

Certainly the business climate on Mars looks more like the Industrial Revolution than the Information Age. Like the workers of a century and more ago, the denizens of Mars are utterly dependent on the Company for their income and their very lives. The Company controls not only the purse strings, but also the generation and delivery of the very air the Martian humans breathe. If the people get out of line -- as they do in "Total Recall" -- all the Company needs to do to restore order is cut off the air supply.

Despite the fact that the Company owns the air, it still isn't the primary threat to human happiness on Mars. Not even the ever-popular little green men, extinct for millions of years, can claim that honor -- the most dangerous thing on Mars is Mars itself.

Until the highly implausible climax of the film, the planetary surface remains a harsh, forbidding landscape, an environment to be confronted at arms length, faced, if at all, from a clean, well-lighted place on the safe side of enormous glass and steel domes. To face the planet on its own terms is to risk mutation or death from asphyxiation.

Freaks and geeks
That isn't to say that the Martian environment doesn't exert a tidal force on the human insects living within these terraria, bending minds and chromosomes right through the domes.

Ostensibly the victims of unsafe working conditions, an entire population of physical and mental "deviants" scrabbles through the colony's lower depths, figuratively touched by the hand of Mars.

While the film never makes this explicit, these people represent more than simple OSHA nightmares. They are arguably an evolutionary detour, demonstrating that environmental adaptations that are necessary if humans are ever to walk on the planet's surface as full participants in the local ecosystem. Far from being freaks, the mutants may well be on the road to becoming the first real Martians, homo martialis.

Granted, this process is accelerated for the purposes of the film -- and the instantaneous terraforming at the end short-circuits the process -- but it is nevertheless a reasonable interpretation of the often-overlooked evolutionary implications of humanity's spread to other planets.

Blue sky on Mars?
For all the inspired and stylish action of "Total Recall", these observations beg the question of whether any of this "really" happened, even in the admittedly illusory world of cinema. Did Doug Quaid win the day against all odds and make his own happy ending, or was it all merely the electronically induced fantasy of a man unhappy with the course his life has taken?

Fans of the film point to the early sequence in which a Recall technician, preparing to load Quaid's fantasy Martian vacation, comments that the program depicts blue skies on Mars -- a "new sequence." Sure enough, the end of the film finds Quaid standing unprotected under the newly blue skies of the former Red Planet. Certainly the unexpected, convenient and utterly implausible resolution of the film suggests that it was all a dream, that in the end Doug Quaid, like Sam Lowry in "Brazil", made his own happiness in the only way he could.

Still, in the end, that is a question that viewers decide for themselves. What is clear is that "Total Recall" offers a rich, unique and ultimately believable depiction of what life on Mars might look like when stripped of idealized preconceptions.