Impostor (2001)

one of my absolute favorites!

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

The first must-see film of the year.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Like all PKD stuff, excellent core idea, but man did they mess it up. What's worse is that it seems like it may have been filmed adequately. The city is very believable, the totalitarian state full of soldiers is a bit of a trope but again feels believable in the way they act and even talk, it sure missed the smartphone era, but got some surveillance right. Gary Sinise is good, Madeleine Stowe is underused, Vincent D'Onofrio chews the scenery a bit, but he's supposed to, Tony Shalhoub and Mekhi Phifer were excellent, and almost against type for them, too bad they were in it so little. But then there's the editing. It's very, very 2001. Motion blur, noises, too many cuts to add tension badly, etc. Often feels, generally, like a lot of the film has been excised in favor of exciting chase stuff, when it's a paranoid drama. When they let it be that way, it works. The plaza "chase" scene is rather good, even the supporting characters like the frustrated soldiers who then stop being faceless drones. And the beginning. Oh! The intro! Minutes of voiceover explaining everything. Which is then explained a bit more with text. And all of it is explained, with in-character narration and flashbacks within 30 minutes! This is such a sign of studio interference. I can just see there's an awesome rough cut that freaked out some studio execs, and they brought in their own guy and re-edited it to death.

In the future, an alien race uses androids as bombs to attack Earth. A government weapons specialist (Gary Sinise) is accused of being one such android and sets out to prove his innocence.James Berardinelli wrote that "Impostor wears out its welcome by the half-hour mark, and doesn't do anything to stir things up until the climax. You could spend the entire midsection of this movie in the bathroom and not miss much." Keith Phipps echoes this, saying "it essentially uses the setup of (the story) as a bookend to one long, dull chase scene." This is about right. I was drawn in early, but by halfway had gone from excited to bored... whether the protagonist was innocent or not was not something I cared about.

IMPOSTOR is a good movie, a solid and effective adaptation of Philip Dick's short story. The screenplay is gripping and tightly written. It's a wild ride, troubling, involving. The story is simple but not simplistic. It has some surprises.All of the key characters' performances are good, and some are extraordinary. Gary Sinise is spot-on as the protagonist, Spencer Olham, running and fighting for his life and something more. Madeleine Stowe gives a genuinely moving performance in the role of Maya, Olham's wife. The chemistry and sense of love between them form the heart of the story.I saw the original on HBO years ago, and liked it enough that I recently bought the DVD with the director's cut. I'm not sure what the differences are, but this cut does feel leaner and tighter. The effects are uneven, which I expect is due to the movie's origin: it was originally conceived as a short, then the producers switched gears in midstream and retooled it into a full length feature. Some of the visuals are borderline, by today's standards, reminiscent of some bad moments on the Sci Fi channel. Others are excellent, so don't let that stop you from seeing the movie.Looking past the uneven SFX, the movie is well worth seeing. One caution: if you haven't seen IMPOSTOR, and see any reviews that warn of spoilers, don't read them. Much of the story's emotional impact has to do with specifics of the plot it's best not to know about when watching it the first time.

I now have the pleasure of having witnessed Gary Sinese's worst movie and worst acting job! I didn't think he could act this bad, given his incredible performances in other works.This tells the story of a distant future (set too close to our own date at 2075) where we are moving out to colonize other stars (having colonized most of our own solar system btw) and at the first stop (wouldn't ya know it!) we encounter a hostile alien race, that amazingly, is pretty much en par with us technologically other than their advanced biological engineering capabilities, leading to a brutal war with nasty alien battlecruisers dropping by every now and again to drop nukes on us, while we dogfight in space with the enemy in futuristic fighters (they blew about 3/4 of the special effects budget in the opening credits and first 5 minutes of the movie) So, obviously the planet Earth has gotten a bit paranoid and harsh through all this, especially when you throw in that the aliens can send 'biological robots' to impersonate us and conduct sabotage missions. To further stretch this plot device to spider silk thin believability, we are also led to believe that when they copy us, they get all of the person's memories, emotions, behaviors, forget they are even an assassin droid, and can morph into a deadly nuclear bomb in seconds when they are triggered, yet this is only detectable by very advanced medical testing.It takes the hard to believe Cylon human replicants to a whole new level, and your left not believing any of it.This of course, leads the ultra-fascist government to abduct and torture anyone who even hints of being an alien, (perhaps a simple "excuse me sir, would you please accompany us to the nearest lab where we can run some routine tests??" would be better than, "I heard you might be an alien! So we are going to drill out your chest to see! Hold still please!")and our poor Gary soon finds himself in this boat. He reacts with horrible acting, to counter the villain torturer's horrible acting. The fight and chase scenes are amateur and hilariously bad. The plot is easily figured out except for the silly second-twist at the very end that really doesn't leave you feeling any better about the movie overall.I would take a definite MISS on this, and if the idea of this intrigues you, I'd recommend re-watching Blade Runner and a few of the new Battlestar Galactica shows instead.