Only Partial Recall, Sadly

I watched part of the new Total Recall last weekend. It was OK. I didn't understand why Kate Beckinsale's character tried to kill Quaid one more time there at the end. Her boss was dead, his plan was blow to bits and scattered across the surface of Mars. It seemed to me the smart move was to disappear, but no, she just had to try and kill Quaid.

It didn't make sense, unless it was professional jealousy, her not wanting to accept he was better than she was. Once she found out who he really was, there was this sense that made her really want to kill him. Based on some things she said, I think she'd spent a lot of time hearing about how great Hauser was. And it undoubtedly had the undercurrent of, "You're not as good as him. That's why we didn't trust you with this mission." I can see how that would get maddening after awhile.

I had thought the Cohaagen in the original Total Recall was a CEO, and I was going to talk about how it was interesting the bad guy was a corporate executive in the 1990, but a politician now. Then I looked it up, and the plot summary on IMDB says Cohaagen was the Mars colony administrator in the first one. So politician either way. Although if you think of a colony as an economic endeavor, and the administrator as being ordered to maximize profit (possibly without much oversight from the home country), he could be roughly equivalent to the head of a business.

Maybe it's because I haven't watched the original the whole way through in a long time, but I have this impression the bad guys were more reactive, or at least less overt. They knew the resistance was up to something, and were trying to figure out what and how to stop it. Whereas in the new version, they seem more overtly aggressive, what with bringing an army of robots to subjugate the entire colony. The resistance really doesn't seem to be much of a threat, seeing as Cohaagen has to create incidents which he can blame them for, rather than having things they actually do to point to.