“Total Recall,” released in 1990 and adapted from a short story by Philip K. “RoboCop,” from 1987, set in a futuristic Detroit, is a gleeful exaggeration of the anxieties of Reagan-era urban life: the office towers are even more isolated, and their boardrooms more brazenly sociopathic the popular culture is a tick or two more savage and leering the police are more overmatched and the streets more ungovernable. In the bloody, satirical sci-fi films that made his name with American audiences, Verhoeven dealt in a singularly unappealing vision of the future, one both luridly inventive and careful about where not to be imaginative. It has become clear, in these last decades of decadence, decline, towering institutional violence, and rampant bad taste, that American life is stuck somewhere inside the Paul Verhoeven cinematic universe.
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