On its surface, the Paul Verhoeven film Total Recall is pure action, with tongue-in-cheek bits of futuristic pop culture making it little more than a nice conversation piece.
Taking a deeper look, and knowing that the film is loosely based on the Philip K. Dick short story, "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale", we know that this is a story of identity. This is something director Paul Verhoeven is known for, in other efforts such as Robocop and Basic Instinct.

In the film, Douglas Quaid has unsettling but strangely attractive dreams of being on the planet Mars. He is married with a regular type of job. But one day, he tempts fate and visits a facility called "Rekall", which sells memory implants. Their specialty is called the fantasy package, creating the illusion that you once were a secret agent. Of course, Mr. Quaid orders the Mars Secret Agent package, and the doctors who perform the implant procedure discover a "memory cap" - implying that he was someone different and someone planted him in a false life. With a cast of misfits to guide him, Quaid finds his way to Mars to finish the mission he once started.

As much as the film is about identity, Ronny Cox's brilliant portrayal of villain Vilos Cohagen implies it's also about control. If you can control someone's identity, you can make them do just about whatever you want. At some point, this plan foils, because nature, for lack of a better term, ultimately breaks free, as people become who they are meant to be in the end. You may be successful with the first one hundred or first one hundred million minds or identities you try to control using artificial force, but part of the lesson here appears to be that eventually, a strong mind will break free and become something greater.

In the end, it's left up to the viewer as to whether or not Quaid becomes that hero, as reality is a relative term in this universe. The ideas in the movie are very dense, the layers profound, but Hollywood unfortunately did not have the patience to explore those - it was too tempted to turn it into a smash-mouth Arnold flick.