The premise is that in the future, it will be possible to have memories impanted into your brain. These memories could be almost anything ranging from holidays on a sunny island to a visit to Saturns rings. These memories are indistinguishable from real events and the person who has them implanted will really beleive the things they remember actually happened.

Arnie plays Doug Quaid, a man who dreams of visiting Mars. After seeing an advert for Recall - the company who sells and implants these memories - he decides that having a memory implanted would be as good as the real thing.

From the moment the implant begins, the film takes a twist and there is no way of knowing whether the rest of the movie is a part of Doug's imagination or is 'reality'.

Grainy

One of the most noticable things about this disc is that the picture is pretty grainy. This is probably more to do with the age of the film than any problems resulting in the DVD pressing.

The anamorphic transfer does mean that although the picture is not the best it could be it is still far superior to VHS.

One noticable picture related problem is that when on Mars the red sky appears blocky and suffers from a few compression artifacts. They don't ruin the film, but I can't help feeling that this is a result of poor encoding - maybe I'm wrong, but the bit rate around this section in the film (at the beginning of Chapter 9) is below 5 Mb/s and I think that if pushed a bit higher the quality of the picture could have been improved considerably.

It's not the worst transfer I've seen by no means. It's just not up there with the best.

The DD5.1 soundtrack is reasonable and is pretty much what you'd expect from a film such as this. The sound effects are well placed and follows the action well.

Anamorphic 4:3

One oddity is that the trailer on this disc is presented in a 4:3 aspect ratio. However instead of filling an entire 4:3 screen it still fills the same vertical area as the 1.85:1 movie - the sides of the picture are made up of black bars!

While this allows the 4:3 picture to be encoded anamorphically, it is a surprising thing to do. Surely a full screen non-anamorphic picture would have been just as good?!

All in all, this is a good film on a decidedly average disc. I'm not sure how it compares to the Region 1 version (if there is one!), but if you're restricted to Region 2 then this is your only option at the moment.

Either way it beats the VHS release hands down and therefore in my book, if you like the film this disc is worth purchasing.