Why this movie is not great?

I agree. there haven't been very many really good Phillip K. Dick adaptations: Blade Runner is the best and is my favorite movie of all time, A Scanner Darkly was also very well done, and had a nice Radiohead soundtrack. Imposter would have been a lot better if it had a descent editor too, you can notice major problems in editing especially with the beginning and end titles are way off, like they didn't give a crap to fix it or something. Either way I always look forward to new Dick adaptations, and the movie based on his life is gonna be one to look forward to in 2009:)

reply share

add reply

formatting help

I love the short stories by Philip K. Dick, especially this one. I think the movie wasn't that bad, but I never expect anything from movie adaptations to begin with.

Sure, it was just a blown-up short story. The changes caused some (ok, A LOT OF) logical errors. And they left out Nelson, at least the Nelson that would kill the alien/his friend without a second thought, which made the short story much more cruel and interesting.

But you can catch a glimpse of the thoughts behind the original story, the acting is good and the ending has a nice twist. I liked it.

reply share

add reply

formatting help

[deleted]

This movie IS great. Sometimes slow, but is very well done. This one and "Screamers" are the best Philip K. Dick's filming adaptations made.

About others... "Paycheck" and "Minority Report" are CRAP sci-fi movies and CRAP Philip K. Dick versions...

"Blade Runner" is a terrific sci-fi movie, but ISNT a Philik K. Dick version. They only focused in one storieline (bounty hunters and androids...) left behind several other stories, more intereseting than these one.

Just read intelligent answers

reply share

add reply

formatting help

I don't know... I mean speaking as a Philip Dick fan I'm not completely satisfied with "Blade Runner" either in the respect that you're talking about. I mean I think it's actually a great movie, and in a way it's a great version of Dick's ethos. But it ends up at an opposite conclusion than what Dick was trying to approach, just like "Impostor" does -- both of them seem to imply that the robot or the mechanism can become just as good as a human (Phifer's character's last line when asked if he knew Olham: "I'd like to think so."/Olmos' last line in Blade Runner: "It's too bad she won't live. But then again, who does?") whereas Dick was more looking for the aspects of humanity that make us different from machines. I think both of them actually reverse some of his themes but in the sense that they're reversed they are still traversing some of the same philosophical ground as Dick, insofar as a big budget action movie can be allowed to.

I've always felt some of the action scenes in "Blade Runner" are pretty over the top, and the same is true for "Imposter" and triply so for "Total Recall" by the ever (and beautifully) excessive Verhoeven. It's easy to object to those aspects of these movies, and I would be interested in a more straightforward version of his stuff. I thought "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" was closer to a lot of Dick's work than most of these movies have been. If someone like Jim Carey or Gary Sinise had been cast in "Total Recall" and maybe a less satiric and visually excessive director than Verhoeven it could have been the most faithful Dick adaptation ever, because it actually follows the story more closely than any of the others I've seen. It's just that it's hard to accept that Arnold Schwartzenegger is some regular guy. The humor of Dick's stories is usually missed in these films, and it's not at all like Verhoeven's humor (which is good in its own way) -- the situation is humorous because he's this normal guy and it's totally ridiculous for him to be some kind of interplanetary super agent, yet he is totally convinced even when all the "evidence" says that the whole thing was just a botched memory implant. You lose that when you have the husband and wife played by people like Arnold Schwartzenegger and Sharon Stone, because I'm more likely to believe they actually are superagents than suburban Americans. Even Harrison Ford is quite a bit more macho and more of an action-hero than the character in Dick's book. And the first sentence of "Minority Report" is all about how the character who Tom Cruise ended up playing is worried about growing old and feeling his receding hairline while contemplating this young up and comer who he's supposed to take on as his assistant. You just don't get that feeling when the scene is played by Tom Cruise and Colin Farrel. So pretty much all these films have really strayed from the ethos that Dick went after in his books. I think Gary Sinise was a much better choice than any of those other guys actually.

Did I not love him, Cooch? MY OWN FLESH I DIDN'T LOVE BETTER!!! But he had to say 'Nooooooooo'

reply share

add reply

formatting help

"I think most fans of Philip K. Dick can't be satisfied after watching this movie. The producers and director made Impostor as a sci-fi and action-packed movie and forgot about the second deep. If is it moral to clone people, the influence on humanity and where will it take us? Only human has rights to have soul? Movie is also about looking for our identity in new world. Remember that PKD wasn't just the writer, but also a philosopher intrested in many aspects of our lifes. In my opinion these such things make diffrence between Blade Runner (android wandering if he can have dreams) and Impostor."

I have to respectfully disagree. I am a big fan of Philip K. Dick (I even share the same birthday) and I felt nothing really lacking in this movie adaptation. I saw it in the theaters too. The moral of the story was not really about cloning and souls. It was about Philip K's favorite thing.....Paranoia of losing ones identity. As well as a healthy dose of cold war fear paranoia. It was a journey of a man assigned with Earth's most powerful weapon and his ultimate fear of being something alien and deadly. I think Spence's last line sumed the movie up best.

"Who am I"

reply share

add reply

formatting help

[deleted]

I think most fans of Philip K. Dick can't be satisfied after watching this movie.

Erm, so are you (the OP) a fan?

Sorry, but one of my pet peeves is people trying to make PERSONAL comments/opinions sound "objective" by giving them in the "third person"-- i.e. speaking as "we" or for "most people", etc. instead of simply "me/I".

Not to mention that, despite appearing to be some kind of textual "purist", I can't tell whether the OP is actually a fan of the PKD-- cos he/she doesn't really distinguish between the movies and the PKD stories (e.g. "Blade Runner" vs "Do Androids dream of electric sheep?").

I mean, Blade Runner is not entirely an example of a "faithful" PKD movie adaptation-- it's a successful/effective movie in the way that Stanley Kubrick's Shining is a successful/effective movie, mostly due to the director's skills in "visuals", "atmosphere", etc. The over-arcing and most important piece of satire in "Do Androids dream of electric sheep" (regarding live/organic animals) is completely left out in Blade Runner to make it a "cool" looking sci-fi-- which is fine, but where's PKD a wicked/weird sense of humor/satire?

But as a casual fan of PKD, i.e. someone reads but doesn't really collect PKD-- this movie adaptation of "Impostor" is actually one of those few times when the changes/adaptations are justified and even improves on the source material... Story/plot-wise, of course (you can't compare "acting", "production values", etc. with different media)-- though it might be the fact that the original short story "Impostor" is rather slight/flawed to begin with.

E.g. Things that would have been dated like the "trigger phrase" (in the short story) were updated to "coalescing at the trigger phase(s)" to make it more plausible for the non-detection of the explosive devices in the age of gene sequencing-- not to mention that voice-activated "trigger phrases" hardly qualifies like an advanced/alien technology in the age of biometrics. And the scale of the "chase" is actually reduced to a more manageable scope around the city/dome and the bordering zone/forest, instead of between the moon to the earth (in the short story).

And unless you want to write/film a different story (using the same basic premise), it can't be helped both the short story and the movie adaptation made use of the "sci-fi/pulp-fiction" tropes of:
1) the inexplicably advanced/magic-like technology, with conveniently unknown/random limitations;
2) the ridiculously easy escapes, allowing for long-drawn chases;
3) the surprisingly stupid antagonists, who are as inept as they are malevolent
4) etc.

I would have preferred more dialogue/drama scenes cos the budget limitations tends to show in the action scenes-- but that would mean coming up with even more material that wasn't in the story, which would still mean coming up with even more budget and development time... so I'm not really upset about the "padding/filler" in the middle-section/sub-plot of the movie-- cos it was at least padding which fitted well with the story/themes of the movie.

In short, the movie by and large succeeded in doing what the short story did for me-- showing me a dystopian future (with the usual militarist-industrial complex) and making me care about the protagonist (who is a totally clueless everyman). Like I said, both the movie and the story are full of these "tropes"-- so they can only be enjoyed WITHIN "genre conventions", not as some ground-breakingly original work.


If you care enough to go around telling people you don't care... you obviously care.

reply share

add reply

formatting help