This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Like all PKD stuff, excellent core idea, but man did they mess it up. What's worse is that it seems like it may have been filmed adequately. The city is very believable, the totalitarian state full of soldiers is a bit of a trope but again feels believable in the way they act and even talk, it sure missed the smartphone era, but got some surveillance right. Gary Sinise is good, Madeleine Stowe is underused, Vincent D'Onofrio chews the scenery a bit, but he's supposed to, Tony Shalhoub and Mekhi Phifer were excellent, and almost against type for them, too bad they were in it so little. But then there's the editing. It's very, very 2001. Motion blur, noises, too many cuts to add tension badly, etc. Often feels, generally, like a lot of the film has been excised in favor of exciting chase stuff, when it's a paranoid drama. When they let it be that way, it works. The plaza "chase" scene is rather good, even the supporting characters like the frustrated soldiers who then stop being faceless drones. And the beginning. Oh! The intro! Minutes of voiceover explaining everything. Which is then explained a bit more with text. And all of it is explained, with in-character narration and flashbacks within 30 minutes! This is such a sign of studio interference. I can just see there's an awesome rough cut that freaked out some studio execs, and they brought in their own guy and re-edited it to death.

In the future, an alien race uses androids as bombs to attack Earth. A government weapons specialist (Gary Sinise) is accused of being one such android and sets out to prove his innocence.James Berardinelli wrote that "Impostor wears out its welcome by the half-hour mark, and doesn't do anything to stir things up until the climax. You could spend the entire midsection of this movie in the bathroom and not miss much." Keith Phipps echoes this, saying "it essentially uses the setup of (the story) as a bookend to one long, dull chase scene." This is about right. I was drawn in early, but by halfway had gone from excited to bored... whether the protagonist was innocent or not was not something I cared about.

I tried watching this film, but instead had it on the background as I found it cliché on a number of levels. A future Earth is in the throes of a military conflict with another world; Alpha Centauri, and the methods of war know no rules; all's fair in love and war, as the saying goes. When conventional means and methods fail to breach Earth defenses, more subtlety is called for.I had a hard time with this film because it portrays one cliché after another; a future fascist like Earthly society where people live a regimented lifestyle where things are either drab gray or in black and white. There is no hope when war is waged, is the message here, and the action sequences to inject energy into this film are taken from all the other formulaic films that have been in the theatres over the last twenty years. Guns, martial arts, super-spy devices, pseudo-SWAT behavior, the list goes on and on of one action film cliché after another. The only thing missing was a car chase.The actors did a fine job. You can't fault them. The story by Phillip K. Dick was an interesting premise, and I think it works too. But the art direction and screenplay needed major adjustments, as well as some of the general direction. In short, the man guiding things behind the camera is not a sci-fi film maker, but an action film maker in Hollywood styleings given a sci-fi script to shoot.To me this film comes across as an elaborate episode of CSI with a dash of a futuristic war to set the stage. I never got the sense that I was experiencing a future society so much as an alternate reality with the notion of a war tacked on as an after thought to give the story plausibility. And, again, we have space Nazis; Hollywood's favorite fetish for bad guys on the big silver screen, including a reference to "storm-troopers" Might not the Centauris just be aliens who want something we have? That's pretty much why wars are fought. And did future Earth have to have their version of fascist society? Could there not have been lots of free people just wanting to throw off the threat of the aliens? But no. Instead we get the evils of fighting for survival alongside your fellow man against an exterior threat because, hey, what civilization would take things from an innocent people?The director tries to give us an anti-war film with all the espionage intrigue and unhealthy paranoia that he can muster, and in a loose dramatic vein it almost works. I got myself a cut rate used copy, and I'm glad that's all it was. I would have been highly disappointed had I paid a full ticket price to sit in a theatre to watch this thing. Highly disappointed. If you like noire-ish futuristic films, then maybe consider seeing this. But, be warned, where this thing wanted to "Blade Runner" it winds up being more like "Streets of Fire" in terms of philosophical vision by the director; i.e. one cliché after another.Watch at your own risk.

Based on a K.Dick 's short story ,a writer who was fascinated by false doubles.The first story I had read by him was "the father-thing" where a boy discovered his father had been "changed" :it scared me to death."Impostor" is more of the same.An Earthman who might be an Alien.The combination of stunning visual effects ,Gary Sinise's great talent and Madeleine Stowe's beauty is quite awesome at times.It's only when the story turns to a banal chase with the usual quota of violence -and I do not even mention an unbearable scene of torture- that a sense of disappointment pervades.How absorbing the movie could have been ,had the director focused on the husband-and-wife relationship (with such first-class actors such as Sinise and Stowe ,it would have been a winner)!the finale is admittedly surprising enough,but without any "psychological" side ,it does not make much sense.