Addition to my review of Minority Report (1/15/2003 6:44:56 PM): Gary Fleder’s Impostor was released 6 months before MR, and is also a PKD short story adaptation, but was far less successful. It started as part of a science fiction anthology film called Light Years Trilogy, then got fleshed out into a feature when the trilogy idea was nixed. The premise is that with Earth in a protracted war with aliens, our last, best hope at victory is scientist, Spencer Olham (Gary Sinise). Blocking him is Hathaway (Vincent D’Onofrio), the government agent convinced the real Olham was replaced with an alien cyborg-bomb with orders to assassinate Earth’s leader, and thus begins the chase. Olham must stay alive to prove Hathaway wrong, but if Hathaway’s not wrong Olham himself is Earth’s greatest threat.
Both MR and Impostor borrow from Blade Runner: flying cars, personalized billboards, fallibility of memory (and precognition), the angst of existence. Where they try to differ they only travel in the opposite direction, like using a cool color palette to convey film noir instead of a warm one. A scene in MR in which cops scan a tenement for body heat with special screens is identical to one in Impostor (save for the little spider robots). This shocked me until I learned Industrial Light & Magic did special effects for both films, which reignites my frustration with the lack of originality in film. They also share ubiquitous identity scanners, and resourceful ways of fooling them. On the whole Spielberg’s utopian murder-free future has eerily too much in common with Fleder’s dystopian war-time police-state future. Having ILM onboard for both solves the “how,” and economy, I assume, solves the “why.” Another reference to pop culture’s canon-of-what-to-come are the roads the mag-lev cars travel that twist and go down the faces of skyscrapers, taken from a recent video game. All this recycling makes me yearn for the days when physical objects were still involved with moviemaking, and you could imagine how many hours a guy spent stenciling windows on a model — the good old days. The Eighties. But it also makes me yearn for a day when we’ll have flying-cars, jet-packs, wallscreens, and talking newspapers. And as long as I do they’ll keep telling me it’s coming tomorrow.
