Movie Ratings
Last updated 14 August 2003
Impostor (2002)
Genre: Sci-Fi / Thriller
Tagline: In the Future, not everyone is who they seem to be.
Plot Summary: An engineer creates the ultimate weapon in a battle against aliens, only to be suspected as an alien himself.
When this arrived in the mail today, I couldn't for the life of me figure out why I added it to my queue. It isn't a movie I've ever heard about. It doesn't have some hot actress that would cause me to rent a movie not knowing anything else about it. I don't *think* it was recommended by anyone. Senility sucks...
So I pop in the DVD and watch the trailer. Nope... still don't recognize it. Oh, it's based on a story by Phillip K Dick (Total Recall, Blade Runner, Screamers). That must have been it.
Oh well, it's science fiction and looks like a decent plot.
It looks like there's the theatrical version and the director's cut. The DVD doesn't say "director's cut" so I must have the theatrical version (though it appears I have the longer of the two).
The basic plot looks like a good story could come from it.
By the middle of the 21st Century, Alpha Centauri has declared war on us. They're not interested in peace. Spence Olham's father is killed fighting the war when Spence is eight years old.
Flash to the "present" (2079). Spence is working on weapons research in the continuing battle with Alpha Centauri. I'll give the writers license as to why a superior race wouldn't have wiped us all out in 30+ years since otherwise we wouldn't have much of a story.
Spence and his wife Maya recently got back from a camping trip away from the domed cities (one effect of the war is that the skies are all polluted and the domes were built to protect against attacks).
The mother of all bombs that Spence's team has been working on for years is finally ready. He likens it to Oppenheimer testing the atom bomb, then being labeled a communist sympathizer when he feels regrets that it is used to wipe out hundreds of thousands of people. He quotes Einstein's "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Major D.H. Hathaway enters the picture, believing Spence has been killed (while on the camping trip) and replaced by a cyborg. He shows a hologram of another person who was duplicated, in whose body they found a bomb.
Spence escapes when they try to move him from a chair to which he was restrained, to a table where they can extract the bomb (apparently set to go off as soon as he is within range of the Chancellor). Or course, any sane person would have had him already strapped to the table while he was drugged, rather than have to move him again while he has his full faculties, but again--the story would be pretty short if he couldn't escape.
In his haste to get out of the labs, he shoots three people who appear in an elevator. Two were guards who would probably have killed him if he had given them a chance; the third was his best friend.
He flees to The Zone, where all the outcasts of society reside. The government attempts to find him, but he successfully eludes them. A band of renegade thugs has better luck. They lock him up and plan to turn him in for the reward. Spence convinces their leader (Cale) to help him get away by promising that his wife (who works in a hospital) could get him all the drugs he'd want.
First, the thug takes Spence to a makeshift hospital in The Zone, where a nurse extracts his barcode (which is surgically implanted in everyone who lives in the city, identifying them any time they pass a scanner).
Meanwhile, Hathaway speaks with Maya, who isn't convinced that the person she's been living with is an impostor; she thinks she'd be able to tell the difference between a replicant and her own husband.
I had a little bit of a hard time believing that they wouldn't be able to prove whether Spence had a bomb in his rib cage without drilling a ten-inch hole in his stomach, but again--that would make the story too easy if they'd be able to scan everyone for bombs (especially if they decided to go with a swerve, like having Hathaway or Maya be the replicant).
Once they fight a battle with Cale's "friends", they make it to the city. Spence has delusions that a bunch of random passers-by look like Hathaway. He's assuming that this is a side effect of the psychotropic drugs that Hathaway injected him with when he was first captured, but we are supposed to wonder if this is really an effect that might be there if Spence really *is* an alien.
Do *all* of Phillip K Dick's stories have to do with a person who is never really sure if all his memories are real or implanted?
It's 75 years in the future, there's still people in wheelchairs, yet there's still stairs all over the place (with no ramps)? Yow!
And in case you weren't sure if it was supposed to be the future, they did what all stupid writers do--they have dimly-lit warehouses with lots of large, slow-moving, vertical fans (with lights behind them). Because we all know there will be lots of those in the future!
Spence drops his "barcode" locator in Hathaway's jacket (amazing how Spence knew *this* Hathaway was the "real" one when everyone he sees look like Hathaway) so that the G-men will keep going in circles trying to find him.
Spence has his own reason for getting to the hospital, as he thinks he'll be able to "prove" that he's not a replicant. Cale asks if he's trying to convince the government or himself.
Once they get to the hospital, Cale fills his pack with a bunch of inexpensive meds. Spence is confused, until he realizes he's taking them to help his sister who is ill, not to sell to junkies.
Spence finds a doctor and tells him to run a scan of him to compare to an old scan of Spence that he grabbed from Maya's desk. The scan starts at his feet, and of course stops just as it gets to his rib cage as security bursts into the room. The machine was having problems right when it got to his rib cage though (it kept saying "recallibrating") so you knew something was up.
Cale comes back to save him, and Spence is able to escape again. He leaves the dome and tells his wife to meet him where the first met. Luckily, this is right next to where the Alpha Centauri war ship accidentally crashed while Spence and Maya were camping.
I'm assuming that this means that the ship crashed, and that no one was able to be swapped with a bomb-filled replicant.
They pry open the ship and find a corpse that looks identical to Maya. Hathaway shows up and says they decoded more of an Alpha Centauri hit list, and Spence wasn't on the list--but Maya was.
The feds shoot Maya dead. I'm still confused as to when the aliens had a chance to swap the bodies (unless the ship crashed when trying to *leave* Earth *after* they swapped the bodies. If the feds didn't know if the ship crashed before or after the swap, you'd think they would have checked the corpse first before shooting the live version of Maya.
Anyway, the feds open the wreckage of the ship some more and find another corpse--this one is the spitting image of Spence.
Spence looks confused and says "if that's Spencer, then who am..." and blows up the entire forest and really tested the sub-woofer on my 650-watt dolby surround system.
The only thing I really wish they would have changed about the movie is to explain better how it was the replicants that were walking around the entire movie and how the real Earth people were in the ship that crashed. One or two lines of dialog could have been added near the end and I would have been fully satisfied.
Still, it was an excellent movie. If I were to compare it to the other Phillip K Dick stories which were made into movies, I'd say it wasn't as good as Total Recall, but was better than Blade Runner. It was perhaps slightly better than Screamers.
There is no commentary track on the DVD, but there is a short (37 minutes) version of the film in the Special Features section. It is pretty much the entire movie (with a couple lines changed) except that when Spence first escapes, they jump immediately to where he calls his wife to meet him where they first met. So they cut an hour out of the middle of the movie. I'm guessing this is closer to the short story that the film was based on, and for the theatrical version of the movie, they had to add the hour of "extra" plot to make it long enough for a traditional movie.
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