Irish actor could be getting his ass to Mars...

Colin Farrell is currently front-runner to star in Len Wiseman's remake of Paul Verhoeven's hit SF outing Total Recall (1990). The lead role is that of Quaid, a lowly and downbeat worker who in the future who is obsessed with going to Mars, but cannot afford it. When he goes for a cheapo fake-memory implant of a Martian holiday instead, it emerges that not only has he already been to Mars many times, but he is a sleeper government operative in deep hiding.

So deep, even he doesn't know about it, believing that he has been an office-worker all his life (well, an office-worker in Philip K. Dick's source story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, though that would have been a bit of a reach for Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1990 version, so Quaid was portrayed as a construction worker in that).

Other recent contenders include Michael Fassbender and Tom Hardy, but they are reported to have unlikely availability compared to Farrell, who has just closed Fright Night and Horrible Bosses.

The script is by Equilibrium's Kurt Wimmer, and it's really not yet known if Total Recall V2.0 will be a remake of the 1990 movie or take its departure point from the considerably shorter material in the short story - much as Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett did for Verhoeven's version.

Truth is, you could film We Can Remember It For You Wholesale for about three million bucks - it's as if PKD was planning to turn it into a theater play, and far more limited than the sprawling, transplanetary action than Arnie got involved in. Both the short story and the 1990 movie are great fun, and there is more resemblance to the source there than between, for instance, PKD's Do Android's Dream Of Electric Sheep? novel and Blade Runner, Ridley Scott's subsequent 1982 adaptation of it. But, as is so often the case with Philip K. Dick's source material, the writer, who died in 1982, does not provide enough for a comprehensible (or long enough) movie in Wholesale.

So we'll see erelong if Farrell (or whoever) has to stick that ghastly contraption up his nose to pull out a tracking device or not, and just what the 'remake'-factor is for this outing.

Anyone who hasn't seen In Bruges (2008) has no idea what Farrell could really do with a mindf***movie of this proportion. On the other hand, if this is 'one for the money', we can just expect the usual bicep exposure, I guess.

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