Len Wiseman, Kate Beckinsale, Bryan Cranston, Jessica Biel, Colin Farrel, and John Cho are all on board. Wow, that's a nice little look at some super-attractive people. They're about halfway done with filming, but they have a little work-in-progress scene to show.
"Want to be a crime figher or athelete or secret agent," asks John Cho? Well, we can help you remember. Of course, before the memory implant can take, alarms start going off. "Son of a bitch. You really are a goddamn spy!" Insert a ten-man strike force, which quickly kills Cho and his assistants, ordering Farrell to put his hands on his head. Before he can, though, he finds himself disarming the first cop, using his gun to take the rest of them out one by one whilst using the first as a human shield. Shades of Matt Damon's awakening as Bourne in the German park early in that film; he can't believe what he's just done. Drops the gun...but here comes a second team.
They fire in an "eyeball," which explodes into a million tiny cameras and shows the officers in the hall a 3D view of the room, letting them know that all their friends are dead. They also know he's alone and locked in the room, so he sets a trap with a number of grenades, blows a hole in the wall, escapes via a lengthy fall. Switch to animatic sequence of Quaid running from a gunship that's on his tail. Looks pretty nice, but there are relatively few finished effects at this point.
It all seems pretty Wiseman-y; the camera jumps around the room in an exaggeratedly kinetic way, but it looks interesting nonetheless. Total Recall was of course full of blood and gunfire, and probably didn't engage with its source material as much as it could've. Doesn't look like this is going to tilt the scales the other direction, but at least we can hope that there's a fair amount of gunfire. It does look like it's fairly PG-13, though, and relatively bloodless, so none of those crazy squibs like the dude on the escalator in the first movie looks like they'll be coming up.
Jessica Biel is Malina, Farrel is Quaid, looks like Beckinsale plays the Sharon Stone character. Cranston is Cohaagen, "the real moral core of the movie." So it looks like they're using a lot of the same characters from the original film; I've never read the original story, so maybe they're all named the same there, too.
Of course, the question is: why a remake? Wiseman says he was interested in telling a story about a world where everything you believe turns out to be alive. This is the second panel for Farrell today, and the second remake panel, to boot. "I thought it was interesting to think about the way people escape from real life, which is what this movie is all about."
Q: Someone actually asks whether Beckinsale's character from Underworld or Blade III would win if they both fought. Most Comic-Con question ever.
