MovieChat Forums > Total Recall (1990) Discussion > "Get ready for a surprise" makes no sens...

"Get ready for a surprise" makes no sense

posted 2 years ago by avortac4 (3622)
9 replies | jump to latest

Brilliant disguise. Completely believable (though why does it have to be a fat hag, when women are usually physically smaller than men, at least heightwise, and Arnold and his character in this movie are physically MASSIVE?).

However, it doesn't make ANY sense that her vocabulary would be THAT limited. Is "two weeks" the only thing they anticipated they would need an answer for? REALLY?

Think about it; they were able to program the head to say 'Get ready for a surprise!", but they could NOT program the head to say a simple, selectable 'yes' or 'no' or any other similar 'default answers' he could have used for many of the questions.

I mean, WHY can the head say 'Get ready for a surprise', but it CAN'T answer 'yes' or 'no'?

It's like a car that can go 180 mph, but not 40 mph. It doesn't make ANY SENSE!

[–] strntz (11086) 2 years ago

This was filmed 30 years ago when digital wasn't all that reliable. It seemed to me that they wrote this scene where they had the head programmed properly to respond to simple questions, but something went wrong and it got caught in a sub-routine and kept repeating the "two weeks" line.

I thought the whole scene was actually silly (why have a high tech disguise at all?) but it was a way to show off the great (for the times) special effect of the woman's head opening up like a puzzle.

But I agree, it was clunky even back in 1990.

[–] ak47wong (483) 2 years ago

Simple explanation is that the fat suit was malfunctioning, which is why after saying "Two weeks" twice she started twitching and her voice started distorting.

[–] spurtle467 (1518) 2 years ago

Clearly the disguise was going faulty at that point and glitched by repeating the "two weeks" over and over.

I used to love this scene in the film when younger but it hasn't aged so well. The animatronic Arnie that you see when he lifts the head off looks terrible.

[–] [deleted] 2 years ago

I thought the animatronic Arnie head looked more like Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry.

[–] spurtle467 (1518) 2 years ago

It all adds to the charm I suppose but objectively speaking it doesn't look good, even for 1990. No better than when the first Terminator did it 6 years earlier.

[–] [deleted] 2 years ago

What about the Peter Weller animatronic head in Robocop? The one that is grimacing just before Clarence Boddicker puts a bullet through it? I thought it was OK for the time.

[–] [deleted] 2 years ago

It was a malfunction, nothing more.

[–] sati_84 (457) a year ago

I think it is pretty clear that the mask was malfunctioning. It looks weird, because when Arnie takes it off (awesome effect as the rows are sliding apart then slide back to reform the head!) he has his "ready for anything" face already, and not the "I'm so confused, I did not anticipate this" face.

But it makes sense. The mask is doing god knows what on the outside because of the malfunction, but Quaid is inside, and he has more than enough time to get his bearings. And when he does, he thinks quick on his feet - given the situation -, decides to take it off and activate self-destruct.

As for the "Get ready for a surprise" line is from a filmmaking perspective a joke, but in-universe it can be explained as the programmers having fun. In some situations, they expected the user to use the mask as a weapon, this is why they included the self-destruction function in the first place. And they wanted to spice it up somehow so they had the mask utter this line prior to the explosion, just for fun.

[–] enriquesingh (1778) a year ago

I never thought it was 'limited vocabulary', but that the device had malfunctioned.