Overview
Impostor is a 2002 American science fiction psychological thriller film based upon the 1953 short story "Impostor" by Philip K. Dick. The film starred Gary Sinise, Madeleine Stowe, Vincent D'Onofrio, and Mekhi Phifer and was directed by Gary Fleder.
Plot
The film takes place in 2079. Forty-five years earlier, Earth was attacked by a hostile and implacable alien civilization from Alpha Centauri. Force field domes are put in place to protect cities, and a totalitarian global military government is established to effect the war and the survival of humans. The Centaurians have never been physically seen.
The film follows Spencer Olham (Gary Sinise), a designer of top-secret government weapons. One day while on his way to work, he is arrested by Major Hathaway (Vincent D'Onofrio) of the Earth Security Administration (ESA), being identified as a replicant created by the aliens. The ESA intercepted an alien transmission which cryptanalysts decoded as programming Olham's target to be the Chancellor, whom he was scheduled to meet. Such replicants are perfect biological copies of existing humans, complete with transplanted memories, and do not know they are replicants. Each has a powerful "U-bomb" in their chest in the exact design of a human heart, which can only be detected by dissection or a high-tech medical scan, since it only arms itself and detonates when it gets in close proximity to its target. Detection via the special scan works by comparing against a previous scan, if there was one.
Major Hathaway begins interrogating Olham. As Hathaway is about to drill out Olham's chest to find the bomb, Olham breaks loose and escapes, accidentally killing his friend Nelson (Tony Shalhoub) in the process. With the help of underground stalker Cale (Mekhi Phifer), Olham avoids capture and sneaks into the hospital where his wife Maya (Madeleine Stowe) is an administrator to get the high-tech scan redone and prove he's not a replicant. But the scan is interrupted by security forces before it can deliver the answer.
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