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 onsider the evolution of “futuristic” sci-fi movies.
Just a scant decade ago filmmakers would be thankful if they could just render a
futuristic cityscape that looks something like their vision. Models and
matte painting were often used; those were primitive tools compared to the
CGI-inspired worlds of today. Nowadays making a spectacular futuristic city
using nothing but intangible CGI is a thing of simplicity. It’s a poor
filmmaker with shallow purse strings that can’t afford to hire a team of
computer graphics engineers to “create” a futuristic city for them. Imagine
it, and it can be done.
Impostor stars Gary Sinise as Spence Olham, a human
weapons designer who builds big bad weapons for the big bad government to fight
a big bad alien enemy called the Centauri. It’s 70 years in the future, and
mankind is hopelessly deadlocked in an intergalactic war with the unseen (but
often heard of) Centauri aliens, who makes a bad habit of attacking Earth from
orbit. This means humans are forced to live inside giant domes protected by
energy barriers to ward off the alien weaponry.
In this city, Spence and his
lovely wife Maya (Madeleine Stowe) live a good life. Despite their opposition to
the war, the two liberal pacifists do their jobs because not doing so could be
seen as treason. Everything is fine, until Spence is accused by a spyhunter name
Hathaway (Vincent D’Onofrio) of being a Centauri cyborg sent to assassinate
the Chancellor! Is Spence an alien killing device that just doesn’t know it?
Or is Hathaway wrong? Can Spence prove his innocence in time?
Impostor is what you might call a “throwaway”
movie. It’s an assumption to think that there was something “more” behind
the movie’s transformation from a short story by sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick
to the big screen. As realized, Impostor is a pointless but expensive
film that only just barely manages to entertain because it showcase some nice
CGI work and displays a wide variety of nifty “future technology.” One
tip-off that even the producers knew they had a turkey on their hands is the
pushing back of Impostor’s release date. The movie was scheduled to be
release about a year before it was finally allowed into theaters – only to die
a fast death, living little trace that it was ever there.
Impostor is a pointless Chase movie that has nothing
else going for it, and doesn’t seem especially bothered by its lack of
presence. Gary Sinise is not only not up to the task of playing an
action-adventure hero, and Impostor’s army of writers seems unable to
find any sort of focus. There is a very weak attempt to talk about poverty and
the concept of “the rich lives well while the poor suffers,” but all of that
is brushed aside for the sake of more chase sequences.
There’s also the matter
of Spence and Maya’s opposition to the war. Unfortunately there’s no effort
to really engage the audience in the pros and cons of fighting an intergalactic
war. Although Spence and Maya’s thoughts on the war leave one to wonder if
these two people are really that “out of it,” since they continue to
badmouth everyone related to the war effort even as the enemy is bombing them
from orbit!
Besides a fantastic but all-too brief view of the
futuristic cityscape early in the film, the movie has few merits. Leads Gary
Sinise and Madeleine Stowe seems unwilling to give their all; in fact, their
performances bring to mind the phrase “picking up a paycheck.” The movie’s
most complex and interesting character is Vincent D’Onofrio’s Hathaway, who
is played as a tenacious, deadly, and calculating machine of a human.
Hathaway’s character is of course a mirror image of Spence, who Hathaway
accuses of being a cold-blooded killing machine, when it’s in fact the very
human Hathaway who is the cold-blood killing machine. Unfortunately Impostor’s
4 (count them, four) writers are either incapable of realizing this
terrific dichotomy, or if they did, were unable to offer anything but this
poorly constructed script.
It doesn’t help that director Gary Fleder seems
unmotivated to make anything worthy of the high production values at hand. The
movie looks very expensive, and probably was. Fleder is probably not the
only person who deserves the blame, as it’s highly probable that the producers
realized their best bet was to heavily edit the film until it became nothing
more than a series of elaborately choreographed chase sequences. As can be
concluded by the final cut of Impostor, there is not a shred of evidence
to indicate that the filmmakers had any ambitions whatsoever.
If plot holes and outlandish scenarios weren’t bad
enough, Impostor should have been re-titled Starship Troopers
Lite.
Besides stealing the general premise of the 1997’s sci-fi “man versus
aliens” movie, Impostor also includes a number of footages lifted
directly from the former movie. Not only that, but Impostor’s
filmmakers even re-used a lot of Starship Troopers’ props –
including the “battle suits” – and many of the exterior locations! It’s
bad enough that Impostor is a poor man’s Starship Troopers (a
concept that in itself is rather questionable), but all of the latter movie’s
satirical elements -- including propaganda posters, Nazi-like atmosphere, and TV
ads -- were simply transferred over to Impostor’s sets!
Impostor is an impostor of a movie. Highly
unintelligent, supremely lazy in its lack of ambition, and mind-boggling in its
repetitive action sequences. If not for a stellar and insane performance by
Vincent D’Onofrio, Impostor is a one-star movie -- at best.
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