BEFORE: It's St. Patrick's Day, so I'm presented with a decision - do I watch an Irish-themed movie, like "Michael Collins", or "Far & Away"? Or do I stick with the birthday-themed plan, which has given structure to an otherwise-formless third Movie Year? I'm going with the latter - Gary Sinise gets Birthday SHOUT-out #20, and I get myself back into science-fiction.
Linking was a bit of a challenge - Jerry Lewis was in "The King of Comedy" with Robert De Niro, who was in "This Boy's Life" with Leonardo DiCaprio, who was in "Catch Me If You Can" with Tom Hanks, who was in "Forrest Gump" with Gary Sinise. If I can link to De Niro, I can get just about anywhere.
THE PLOT: An engineer creates the ultimate weapon in a battle against aliens, only to be suspected as an alien himself.
AFTER: For extra fun, I counted how many of this film's actors have starred in TV procedural dramas - the lead detectives of "CSI:NY", "Law & Order: Criminal Intent" and "Monk" are featured here, and among the soldiers were two more future cast members of "CSI" and "CSI: Miami". Did you spot them?
This film is set in 2050, and based on a story by Philip K. Dick, who wrote similar stories that were turned into movies like "Blade Runner" which I've seen, and "Total Recall", which I haven't. The guy liked to write about clones/replicants, and things like false memories and identities. ("If I'm not me, then who the hell am I?")
These themes pop up in this film as we see Earth under siege from an alien attack, and the humans have erected domes over their cities for protection. So, apparently the way for the aliens to destroy humanity is to send in a "human bomb", a replicant of an important human that is programmed to explode when in the presence of another important person, say, the President.
Sinise plays Spencer Olham, an important scientist who's accused of being such a bomb - at some point, aliens may have replaced him with a replicant/clone bomb that believes itself to be human - so as to pass a lie-detector test, one assumes, or fool any other type of scan. What a coincidence, Olham's the man who's invented a way to prove that humans are humans, so he's both a key target for the aliens, and the only man who can determine the truth about himself.
I'm reading a little between the lines here - the movie doesn't do a great job of explaining its own tech, of course it's extrapolating from the tech we have, which is the job of sci-fi, after all. I liked how some future tech was just taken as a given (detailed 3-D medical scans, locks that are opened by DNA) but a little more explanation of the alien tech as relating to the plot might have been appreciated.
Marvel Comics did a year-long story similar to this idea a while back, called "Secret Invasion", and it involved an alien shape-changing race called the Skrulls, and their decade-long plan to take over the Earth by masquerading as key superheroes. They also underwent brainwashing, so the aliens would believe themselves to be those heroes, and thus able to fool psychics, lie-detectors, etc. It was an interesting idea, but ended up being more of a smokescreen for a particular writer to dispose of characters he didn't like, and resurrect some of the deceased ones that he did like (Oh, they weren't dead, just held in an alien prison for the last 5 years. Sure...)
The problem was, if I read Iron Man's comic and care about him and his life, you can't suddenly tell me that he's been an alien for the last 2 years - so why did I waste my time reading a comic about him? In a similar vein, if the main character in your film is an alien sleeper agent, isn't my time spent caring about him wasted effort? (And if he's not the alien agent, then who is?)
Also starring Vincent D'Onofrio (last seen in "The Break-Up"), Tony Shalhoub (last seen in "Honeymoon in Vegas"), Madeleine Stowe (last seen in "The Two Jakes"), Mekhi Pfifer (last seen in "Clockers"), Elizabeth Pena (last seen in "Blue Steel"), with cameos from Lindsay Crouse (last seen in "The Juror"), Rosalind Chao (last seen in "I Am Sam") and Clarence Williams III. And that was Gary Dourdan from "CSI" and Adam Rodriguez from "CSI: Miami" as police troopers.
RATING: 6 out of 10 laser-beams
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