Impostor
*1/2
Cinema Releases - June 14, 2002
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. USA.
95 minutes. Directed by Gary Fleder. Written by Caroline Case, Ehren Kruger,
David N. Twohy; adapted by Scott Rosenberg from the short story by Philip
K. Dick. Starring Gary Sinise, Vincent D'Onofrio, Madeline Stowe, Mekhi Phifer,
Tony Shalhoub.
"Impostor" takes place in the year
2079 -- a place in time where the sky has been replaced by electromagnetic
shields to protect against alien missiles. History records a first attack
after which martial law was declared, all communications became monitored
and global corporations replaced democracy with installed leaders who launched
all-out ground and sky wars. As the voice-over is telling me this, a chill
is going down my spine, and I'm thinking hey, sounds a lot like the new Bush
administration. Philip K. Dick, prophetic science-fiction legend that he
was, wrote the short story upon which this film is based in the late
1950s.
Gary Sinise stars as a scientist who builds missile
systems for Earth's powers that be. At the beginning of the movie, he is
accosted by Vincent D'Onofrio, who plays a member of the secret police and
is convinced that Sinise is an organically generated cyborg sent by aliens
to blow up a prominent politician. Alien impostors are all over the place,
you see, and they're hard to detect because they are made of living tissue
and designed to think of themselves as real people right up until they
detonate.
The situation is pretty interesting, and "Impostor"
could have become a study of totalitarianism while weighing up questions
of perception and identity. But as this is a novella spun out to feature
length, it instead turns into a dreary series of chases and gunfights. Sinise
hides in buildings and runs into corners, while D'Onofrio sniffs around streets
with hi-tech tracking devices before screaming, "He's in there! Here's in
there! Let's go!"
Chase movies are not intrinsically bad; Paul
Verhoeven's "Total Recall" is a well-respected example of a Philip K. Dick
short story adapted into action filmmaking. "Impostor" doesn't have the visual
life of Verhoeven, though; it looks dank, crummy and cheap, with muddy and
synthetic objects cluttered about sets and phoney-looking video monitors
stuck at the tops and sides for some sort of technological punctuation. Once
the movie abandons ideas, it falls flat -- it's not well made enough to engage
us with shallowness.
Things go on and on. Sinise runs, D'Onofrio follows,
Madeleine Stowe hangs around in the sidelines and bullets fly through the
air now and again. We can tell there's going to be a twist ending, but I
found it kinda surprising when it came, because there seemed to be two possible
twists for the movie to choose between and it ended up going with both of
them. The final shot is pretty chilling, but the implications of the final
events are annoying -- like the twist at the end of the "Blade Runner" (again,
based on Dick), it's intended as a cool dramatic gimmick but ends up giving
credence to the authoritarian arguments the material is supposed to argue
against. Sigh.
COPYRIGHT©
2002 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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