Impostor by Phillip K Dick

First published in June 1953, Impostor tells the story of Spence Olham, a scientist working on a weapon of mass destruction to fight back against alien invaders. Earth has been at war with Alpha Centauri for some time, and Spence is doing his part for the war effort.

You can read Impostor here.

On his way to work one morning, Spence is intercepted by a security officer and accused of being an android spy sent by Alpha Centauri to kill the real Spence Olham and replace him. His final mission is supposedly to infiltrate the Project where he works, and detonate a U-bomb hidden inside his chest.

Needless to say, Spence is distraught. He knows he isn't an android, so he escapes and sets out to prove his innocence.

It's a very short read, but one that pays off in the end. It's yet another example of Philip K. Dick's approach to storytelling, where the protagonist is forced to question his own reality. We see similar ideas pop up in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and, to a lesser degree, Second Variety. It's also a theme in We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, although I think it's explored much better in the film adaptation, Total Recall.

Dick himself recognized Impostor as one of the earliest examples of what would become one of his defining obsessions:

Here was my first story on the topic of: Am I a human? Or am I just programmed to believe I am human? When you consider that I wrote this back in 1953, it was, if I may say so, a pretty damn good new idea in sf. Of course, by now I've done it to death. But the theme still preoccupies me. It's an important theme because it forces us to ask: What is a human? And -- what isn't.

I love that Dick was self-aware enough to admit that he'd eventually done the idea "to death," because he really did return to it again and again. But that's also what makes Impostor interesting to read today. You can see him beginning to wrestle with a question that would follow him throughout much of his career: if your memories, emotions, and sense of self tell you that you're human, does it really matter what you're made of? This is a topic that I've grown quite interested in the past few months, so I'm always down to explore another take on it.

In what would become Gary Sinise's final theatrical starring role, Impostor was released in 2001 and directed by Gary Fleder, who was coming off movies like Kiss the Girls and Don't Say a Word. Co-starring the always great Vincent D'Onofrio, Madeleine Stowe, Mekhi Phifer, and Tony Shalhoub, the movie had a pretty stacked cast for this sort of sci-fi adventure.

Made for a reasonable $40 million, Impostor bombed at the box office, bringing in only around $8 million, and it's not difficult to see why.

The original short story is very short. It's the type of story that feels perfectly suited for a thirty-minute episode of an anthology show, which isn't far off from what the movie was originally supposed to be.

Impostor was planned as one segment of an anthology film called Light Years. It was going to be adapted alongside Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question" by Bryan Singer and Donald A. Wollheim's "Mimic" by Matthew Robbins. And yep, that's the same Mimic that Guillermo del Toro eventually made, although with a different script.

Impostor was actually shot, but when the anthology fell apart, rather than scrap the footage, the decision was made to expand the segment into a full-length feature.

According to Wikipedia:

The short was originally written by Scott Rosenberg, with revisions by Mark Protosevich and Caroline Case. When it was decided to expand the short into a feature-length film, additional scenes were written by Richard Jeffries, Ehren Kruger, and David Twohy.

You know when you have that many writers involved, the script is probably going to suffer.

I'm a fan of David Twohy's storytelling, but not so much Ehren Kruger's. Richard Jeffries also has a pretty solid track record with movies like Con Air, Disturbing Behavior, High Fidelity, and the more recent Jumanji films. Still, what eventually made it to the screen feels like a Frankenstein's monster of a movie stitched together from several different versions of the same idea.

The movie feels low-budget, and the story simply can't support the length of a feature film. Why they decided to push it all the way to an hour and forty-five minutes, I'll never understand. Maybe, just maybe, had it been a tight eighty or ninety minutes, it would have been better received.

The middle is the problem and I imagine that is where the additional scenes came into play. It's a slog and feels unnecessary.

The ending is different from the short story, but I wasn't mad about it. It made sense within the movie, and I thought it provided an interesting twist without completely abandoning what made Dick's original ending work.

Interestingly, the story also seems to have inspired the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Whispers."

If I had to pick one version of Impostor to enjoy, it would without a doubt be the short story. The movie was a one-time watch for me. Although, I did enjoy seeing the movie recycle a bunch of Starship Trooper uniforms.

Next up, another story I haven't experienced in either book or film format: Adjustment Team aka The Adjustment Bureau.