The midnight Nash Rambler (1/14/02)
____________
Impostor. [Gary Fleder, 2002. Written by Scott Rosenberg.]
The idyllic existence [well, love life, anyway] of ace Terran weapons scientist Gary Sinise is derailed one morning in 2079 when SS Oberleutnant Vincent D’Onofrio seizes him on the way to work at the local version of Los Alamos and tells him that, Cartesian certainty regarding his own identity notwithstanding, he’s been replaced by an android double, complete with synthetic memories, manufactured by the evil Centaurans; with whom the Earth has now been at war long enough that, outside the electromagnetic shields that cover the major cities, the whole planet looks like Afghanistan. Objecting to D’Onofrio’s expressed intent to rip the hypothetical bomb in his torso out by vivisection, our hero escapes and spends most of the second act running around the twenty-first century equivalent of the sewers of Paris dodging the pigs before he is reunited with his wife, gorgeous doctor Madeleine Stowe, and gets his chance at last to prove himself innocent of espionage; forgive me if I spare you the last half-dozen twists, which establish, sort of, that nothing is as it appears.
Obviously no one could ape Philip K. Dick so shamelessly, and, in fact, this is based directly on a story written by the master himself in 1953; making it, if nothing else, a classic specimen of Cold War paranoia. But despite the Orwellian aura of D’Onofrio and the vague hint that Sinise is being set up because he has, like Oppenheimer, developed bad conscience about building the Ultimate Weapon [a tower of very ominous appearance, perhaps not coincidentally to be tested on the morrow], the conspiracy against him seems unmotivated and irrational; nor does it seem to have occurred to anyone to allow the [extraordinarily capable] lead to express the ambiguity of character that might have thrown the interpretation of the situation into doubt. Instead, he just comes off as a faux-Hitchcock hero who has been Wrongfully Accused; and, indeed, they might as well have gone straight to the parody starring Leslie Nielsen. When it comes to cosmic paranoia, Fleder and Rosenberg don’t know Dick.
____________The fisher king goes west (1/4/02)
