mrnunleygo If you like impressive-looking sci-fi with lots of running around, you might like this. On the other hand, if you like thoughtful, intelligent science fiction, you can safely give this one a pass. With a talented cast, good budget, and a terrific premise by Phil Dick (who also inspired the brilliant Blade Runner and Total Recall), this should have been a fine movie. I don't know whether to blame the director, the writer (adapter), or both. (Each has done things I've liked in the past.) There are lots of troublesome inconsistencies, but I want to keep spoilers to a minimum. I can suspend disbelief and I think I have a fair tolerance for implausible heroics and holes in plots. But in science fiction or in fantasy, realism by default must be grounded in the characters, and I couldn't make myself believe the two leads—one a supposedly brainy weapons scientist, the other a top intelligence official—could possibly be so much stupider than the viewing audience. Neither seems capable of self-reflection or insight into the motives of anyone else. An interrogation scene near the beginning of the movie is a brain-numbing disaster. Vincent D'Onofrio's bullet-headed intelligence officer is portrayed as impervious to critical thought and mindlessly cruel. If he believes the circumstances are as he says slightly later in the film, it's senseless for him to act and talk as he does during the interrogation. (Also, didn't anyone ever teach him about the concept of "misinformation"?) Meanwhile, Gary Sinise's rocket scientist, instead of trying to persuade onlookers by asking obvious logical questions, adopts an initial strategy for escape makes no sense whatsoever (and has no obvious point). Mekhi Phifer, good as always, plays the only role that seems remotely plausible. The film director does achieve the small miracle of making a character played by Madeleine Stowe uninteresting, but at least she is given the chance to ask, halfway through the film, the question every character should have been asking from the beginning: "How can you be sure?" That is the central theme of Dick's message, although it's message few of the characters in this film could have understood.

James The best, most thoughtful, most fun part of this effort from Gary Fleder based on a 1953 Philip Dick novel is that technology might become so advanced (or alien) that one might not even know one's identity as friend or enemy. And if one doesn't even know, then what kind of enemy is that? Rather sadly, in a way, this point is made very strongly in a quite early (and quite memorable) scene in "Impostor", and we don't really recapture those heady heights until the last 5 minutes. It's no secret (or even spoiler) that much of the film is devoted to having us wonder if our hero is ... or isn't. Simultaneously, we've got a routine-ish "fugitive on the run" movie, if one made reasonably compelling by the solid performance of Gary Sinese as Spencer Olham, as well as certain futuristic touches giving us the odd insight into the world in 2079. But since this is all taking place in a (very) long-distance (and pretty technologically implausible) war between Earth and Alpha Centauri that has necessitated far-reaching changes on our home planet, this reviewer at least felt regularly distracted by a yearning to home in more on that kind of topic (nicely rendered in "Starship Troopers"), as opposed to wondering whether Olham is going to manage to get through this door, slip down that dark and gloomy tunnel (much of this film is in over-subdued lighting), or find some other way to evade the next detector device. Maybe the small story illustrates the bigger picture, but here we have only hints of the latter, which we'd certainly like more of. What is quite interesting is interplay between Sinese's character and that of Cale (played by Mekhi Phifer), though the status of his group of outlaws goes somewhat unexplained. After all, Earth has a deadly alien enemy, so a desire on the part of some to rebel against a rather dictatorial regime can't help but look a bit of a finicky sideshow. A pretty good and nuanced performance is also turned in by Vincent D'Onofrio as Hathaway.Seasoned sci fi fans keen on seeing every film in the genre should not miss it (and Dick is Dick for all that - though the short story is still out there, on paper). Nor should Sinese aficionados pass up the chance (he also produced). Others may wonder if their time might not be better spent, though admittedly this is a short piece at less than 90 minutes before the credits roll.

gavin6942 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.

Blueghost I tried watching this film, but instead had it on the background as I found it cliché on a number of levels. A future Earth is in the throes of a military conflict with another world; Alpha Centauri, and the methods of war know no rules; all's fair in love and war, as the saying goes. When conventional means and methods fail to breach Earth defenses, more subtlety is called for.I had a hard time with this film because it portrays one cliché after another; a future fascist like Earthly society where people live a regimented lifestyle where things are either drab gray or in black and white. There is no hope when war is waged, is the message here, and the action sequences to inject energy into this film are taken from all the other formulaic films that have been in the theatres over the last twenty years. Guns, martial arts, super-spy devices, pseudo-SWAT behavior, the list goes on and on of one action film cliché after another. The only thing missing was a car chase.The actors did a fine job. You can't fault them. The story by Phillip K. Dick was an interesting premise, and I think it works too. But the art direction and screenplay needed major adjustments, as well as some of the general direction. In short, the man guiding things behind the camera is not a sci-fi film maker, but an action film maker in Hollywood styleings given a sci-fi script to shoot.To me this film comes across as an elaborate episode of CSI with a dash of a futuristic war to set the stage. I never got the sense that I was experiencing a future society so much as an alternate reality with the notion of a war tacked on as an after thought to give the story plausibility. And, again, we have space Nazis; Hollywood's favorite fetish for bad guys on the big silver screen, including a reference to "storm-troopers" Might not the Centauris just be aliens who want something we have? That's pretty much why wars are fought. And did future Earth have to have their version of fascist society? Could there not have been lots of free people just wanting to throw off the threat of the aliens? But no. Instead we get the evils of fighting for survival alongside your fellow man against an exterior threat because, hey, what civilization would take things from an innocent people?The director tries to give us an anti-war film with all the espionage intrigue and unhealthy paranoia that he can muster, and in a loose dramatic vein it almost works. I got myself a cut rate used copy, and I'm glad that's all it was. I would have been highly disappointed had I paid a full ticket price to sit in a theatre to watch this thing. Highly disappointed. If you like noire-ish futuristic films, then maybe consider seeing this. But, be warned, where this thing wanted to "Blade Runner" it winds up being more like "Streets of Fire" in terms of philosophical vision by the director; i.e. one cliché after another.Watch at your own risk.