Impostor

Gary Fleder

BY Leon LukashevskyPublished Nov 17, 2016

Year 2079, the earth's developed centres are, in aspect, too wrong in their rightness, like a neat array of many identical pairs of khakis, and the deteriorated remainder is too right in its wrongness, like a male model's dishevelled hairdo. Such is the setting of "Impostor," a vision of the future presented with all the tact of an overused wink. Regrettably, the films uninspired personality drowns out a provocative Philip K. Dick story upon which it is based.

Introduced through an assortment of clichés as a regarded government scientist and all around good guy, the protagonist's struggle begins when his identity is put into question by the state. He is marked as an alleged alien spy on a kamikaze mission, a genetically perfect impostor who has been put in place of the real man, and whose genius is that he is convinced that he is who he is pretending to be. Thus commences a tired thriller that is too scared of ambiguity to either approach the questions concerning identity and being that the main characters dilemma opens onto, or probe the depths of his psychological disintegration. The conclusion of "Impostor" makes one keenly aware of the dispassion with which he has viewed it, incorporating a plot twist that you'd wish it hadn't bothered with, and revealing a glaring logic error you don't care much to dwell on.

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