Impostor Information

Impostor is a 2001 American science fiction film based upon the 1953 short story of the same name by Philip K. Dick.

Plot

The movie takes place in the year 2079. 45 years earlier, Earth was attacked by a hostile and implacable alien civilization from Alpha Centauri. Force shield domes are put in place to protect cities, and a totalitarian global military government is established to effect the war and the survival of humans.

The film follows Spencer Olham, a designer of top secret government weapons. He is arrested by Major Hathaway of the Earth Security Administration (ESA), being identified as a replicant created by the aliens. The ESA intercepted an alien transmission which cryptanalysts decoded as programming Olham's target to be the Chancellor, whom he was scheduled to meet. Such replicants are perfect biological copies of existing humans, complete with transplanted memories... and do not know they are replicants. Each has a very powerful "u-bomb" in their chest, which can only be detected by either dissection, or by a very exotic high-tech medical scan, since it only assembles itself when it gets in proximity to its target. Detection via the special scan works by comparing against a previous scan, if there was one.

Major Hathaway begins interrogating Olham. As he's about to drill out his chest to find the bomb, Olham breaks loose and escapes, accidentally killing his friend Nelson in the process. With the help of underground stalker Cale, Olham avoids capture and sneaks into a hospital (where his wife Maya is an administrator) in order to get the high-tech scan redone, to prove he's not a replicant. But the scan is interrupted by security forces before it can deliver the answer.

Olham and his wife are eventually captured by Hathaway's troops in a forest near an alien crash site near the spot where they spent a weekend. Inside the ship they discover the corpses of the real Maya and Spencer, who were indeed killed on their weekend picnic. At that moment Olham realizes that he really is a replicant and the secondary trigger detonates his bomb, destroying himself, Maya, Hathaway, and everything in a wide area. In the final scene, the news announces that Hathaway and the Olhams were killed in an enemy attack, as if the government was covering up the true resolution, or didn't know it. And Cale wonders if he really knew Olham's true identity.

Cast

• Gary Sinise as Spencer Olham
• Madeleine Stowe as Maya Olham
• Vincent D'Onofrio as Hathaway
• Tony Shalhoub as Nelson Gittes
• Tim Guinee as Dr. Carone
• Mekhi Phifer as Cale
• Gary Dourdan as Captain Burke
• Lindsay Crouse as Chancellor
• Clarence Williams III as Secretary of Defense (uncredited)
• Elizabeth Pena as Midwife
• Shane Brolly as Lt. Burrows
• Golden Brooks as Cale's Sister
• Ted King as RMR Operator
• Rachel Luttrell as Scan Room Nurse

Production

The film adaptation was originally planned to be one segment of a three-part science fiction anthology film titled Light Years, but was the only segment filmed before the project fell apart. The other shorts were to be adaptations of Isaac Asimov's story "The Last Question" by Bryan Singer and Donald A. Wollheim's story "Mimic" by Matthew Robbins. "Mimic" had already been adapted into a film of the same name, but with a different script.

The short was originally written by Scott Rosenberg, with revisions by Mark Protosevich and Caroline Case. When it was decided to expand the short into a feature-length film, additional scenes were written by Richard Jeffries, Ehren Kruger, and David Twohy.

Burn areas in Running Springs, California, were used to create the space craft crash site. Sets were constructed in Angeles National Forest and in numerous areas around Los Angeles. Most of the interiors were built on stage in Manhattan Beach, including a two-story hospital and 3-story pharmacy, and a commuter transport station with articulated commuter "bugs". Other filming locations included the Coachella Valley.

The movie was made on an estimated $40 million budget.

Reception

Critical response

Impostor received poor to average and few positive reviews from critics. Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 21% based on 91 reviews. Metacritic gives the film a score of 33% based on 26 reviews.

James Berardinelli of ReelViews gave the film two and a half stars (out of four), saying "there are a few moderately diverting subplots and the storyline eventually gets somewhere," but added 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." William Arnold of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer gave the film a mildly positive review, praising lead actor Gary Sinise's ability to "hold the film together and provide a strong, sympathetic human focus. The movie's atmosphere has a very definite Blade Runner feel." Maitland McDonagh of TV Guide gave the film three stars out of four, saying it packed "a real emotional wallop," but suggested that it would have worked better as the 40-minute short film it was originally intended to be.

Keith Phipps of The Onion's A.V. Club gave the film a negative review, saying that "it essentially uses the setup of [the story] as a bookend to one long, dull chase scene." Robert Koehler of Variety also criticized the film, calling it "a stubbornly unexciting ride into the near future."

Box office

The film earned a little over $6 million at the box office in the United States and Canada, with the estimated worldwide of over $8 million, thus making it a box office failure.