Imposter

Yet another big movie made from a Philip K. Dick short story. It’s 2079 and Earth has been at war with invaders from Alpha Centauri for a few decades. The Centaurians have a technology whereby they can kill someone and put all his memories into a cloned body indistinguishable from the real one without elaborate tests. So the replicant thinks he’s the original. Through some hocus-pocus an extremely powerful bomb can come together through nanotechnology, and assassinate Earth’s leaders. So the replicant’s job is to get close. How he’s supposed to do that without realizing he’s a walking bomb was never clear to me.

There are those who have postulated that if humanity were faced with an alien invasion we’d all come together, forget our differences, and all sing kumbayah together as we fought off the enemy. Maybe, but even if it united us under one government, I believe strongly that that government would be fascist in nature. Fascism thrives in bad times, whether war—on “terror” or anything else—or economic calamities. Just look around you, at our Constitution which now is as shredded at the flag at Fort McHenry. That’s the case here. Gary Sinise, an important scientist, is brutally arrested, brutally questioned, and is about to be brutally murdered solely on the say-so of an agent of Homeland Security … er, a clandestine government agency, who believes he is a replicant. Gary escapes, and the rest of the movie is a chase. I’m afraid I saw the “surprise” ending coming a mile away, though there was a bit of a double whammy that I hadn’t anticipated. Still, it wasn’t enough to rescue this rather pointless effort. I will say that the sets and production design were quite good, in places. So what else is new?