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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Yet another good movie based on a Philip K Dick story, 4 Oct 2003
There is something insidious about a PKD plot. Many of them lend themselves to movie adaptation - for instance Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Blade Runner), We can remember it for you wholesale (Total Recall) and of course Minority Report. It's been 30 years since I read the story, but it was still pretty fresh in my mind. The script seems to stick pretty close to what PKD wrote, and that may be the problem. It distresses me to admit that a movie can go wrong by being too faithful to the story on which it is based, but that seems to have happened here. The lack of insight into the protagonist's feelings and thought processes limits the empathy you can feel for him, so the plot ends up as a kind of telescoped futuristic "The Fugitive". Gary Sinise does what he can with the lead role, with Madeleine Stowe even more muted as his wife. The two most colourful characters are Vincent D'Onofrio as the ambivalent Major Hathaway of Security, and Mekhi Phifer as the streetwise Cale. Bottom line - this is a story set in 2075 but written in about 1960, and that harms its credibility. Our surveillance techniques today are just about as good as those in Impostor - surely a dictatorship locked in a life-and-death struggle with merciless aliens, 70 years in the future, could do better when it comes to tracking a runaway? Perhaps a little more explanation and less high-speed, hard-to-follow action would have helped. When all is said and done, it's still a pleasure to follow the precise mechanism of PKD's scenario as it works itself out.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Impostor, 30 Jun 2005
This was a cross between Blade Runner (without the Harrison Ford/ Rutger Hauer chemistry) and a cheap Starship Troopers (without the bugs!) It was irritatingly filmed with hand held camera's. It had some deeply unbelievable scenarios. Gary Sinise sweated a lot. Vincent D'Onofrio made a good villain and he had the best line in the film, when asked how he slept at night (after a day spent torturing potentially innocent people) he replied "We lost 10 and saved 10,000 - I sleep like a baby, Mr Secretary!" The ending was predictable from a long way off. It's all right to view once...
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Another Philip K Dick's story, as we like them, 26 Jan 2011
This review is from: Impostor [DVD] [2002] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC] (DVD)
A great cast for a great story with a nice twist, where the main character - a scientist specialized in weaponry in a future war against aliens, suddenly finds himself public enemy # 1 and doubting his own identity.
Gary Sinise (Mission to Mars) is, as usual, exceptional. Vincent D'Onofrio, although a bit verbose, makes a decent "bad" government agent, and the atmosphere and visual effects credibly render the Earth at war in the year 2075.
I recommend to first watch the short version of the movie, provided in the DVD as a special feature and which was the intended original version. This short film is well balanced and straight to the point: a great Philip K. Dick's story. The long version (a request from the production) has an added middle part dragging you through concrete corridors with not-quite-convincing action scenes: this breaks the dynamics and may explain the bad reviews it received.
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