OK, when it is revealed to Maya Olham she is an Impostor, she doesn't detonate. But when Spence Olham finds out he's an Impostor, its KA-BLAMMO! Why the double standard? Unless Major D.H. Hathaway was the target all along (why didn't he detonate during the numerous times Hathaway was around before?) or he was supposed to destroy the Centurian ship (the evidence)?
share[deleted]
Yeah, I liked the double twist, but I thought it was a bit suss Imposter Spence didn't realise the truth when the machine in the Veteran's Hospital had problems.
share[deleted]
When it gets to the part of his torso where his heart is, it makes grinding mechanical noises and says stuff like 'recalibrating'. Everything was going fine in the scan before that.
shareSorry, I just now watched the movie on 4-20-03 (almost forgot about it). But the ending makes NO sense at all. Don't get me wrong, I want to understand it and like it but it does not work. You say the thing to detonate the bomb is a spoken "phrase". It's not a "phrase" as in a sentence, but "phase" (I watched that part twice to make sure). The impostor alien has a proximity bomb in it's chest. Meaning, it only explodes once it gets within a certain area, a range, to it's target. Without getting close to it's target, the alien is simply a spectator, nothing more. The fact that it blew up when it did, defies logic. What did it get in range of that it hadn't before? It wasn't his own dead body, because he'd gotten closer to it before hand. Plus, he never moved closer to it, say from 11 feet away to 10 feet which would then detonate!
*** CONTAINS SPOILER ***
I answered this most of these questions on another thread, before visiting this one.
The ending is actually quite logical: The replicant was programmed to self destruct once it realized what it was (that famous last line, remember?).
The other two replicants still believed they were human when they died, so Hathaway wouldn't have known about the self destruct mechanism, which explains why the audience wasn't told. It's entirely possible that the first replicant (the "prototype") may not even have been programmed that way (but that's just speculation on my part).
So why would a replicant have to self destruct rather than know what it is? I can think of one or two explanations. Maybe it would otherwise switch sides (having an almost human psyche) or maybe it can't fool anyone, if it can't even fool itself (human psyche again...).
Whether or not Maya had a bomb is not relevant. She may have had one, just to make sure, or she may have been replicated just to make sure the real Maya was out of the way.
Ian
I think this movie has alot to do with the characters souls. It seems to me the alien force somehow could make a clone of a person, inject memories and everything else into the clone to make it think its the actual person. The clone contains the actual soul of the person. Thats why Garys character was in denial of being an imposter because it was still him inside the body.
At the end of the movie wasnt the trigger when they pulled a dagger out of his wife or something??? I guess when he saw them pull the dagger out it triggered the bomb and it took over his body, then exploded....
No, the trigger was that he finally knew for a fact that he was a replicant. He saw the body of the real Olham, and couldn't delude himself any more.
The point you're making about the soul is interesting.
Yes! For all the mailings about trigger formulae, it's when he realises he isn't "him"!
shareI think that there was no bomb in Maya. She was the decoy... not Olham. The targer WAS the whatsit lady. The chancellor or whatever. But since the bomb with a brain of its own realized it was a bomb, it detonated as if in an emergency.
share[deleted]
But Maya would have been at that dinner-whatever-shebang Dr. Olham and that lady were going to attend. She was his wife, she would attend as well (I think she might have attended in her own right due to her connection to the VH as well, I'm not sure).
shareI personally thought the Olham-bot self-destructed when he learned he wasn't human. This is not contradictory to what his wife-bot did. The Olham-bot had a lot of time to think through this and come to grips with this possibility, while his wife-bot was just posed with this possibility. It's one thing to see a dead "you," its another to actually believe it and act on it.
Because of this, I did not have a problem with his wife not self-destructing. She had not come to grips with what was happening. She was in a state of shock whereas the Olham-bot, having already thought through this, was ready to accept the consequences and act accordingly.
The question I am toying with is whether he might have self destructed of his own free will when he realized what he really was. In a sense it gave his existence purpose.
I am in agreement with mightymoose21- maya did not have a bomb, hence no self destruct, she was a decoy and there was no phrase (if there was then I sure missed it) just an emergency thing.
shareMy guess is that the bots weren't programmed to explode unless the mission had been completely compromised. When Maya was revealed as an Imposter, Spencer still had a chance (however slim) of completing his mission (killing the Chancellor). Once Spencer was found out, the system figured that the mission was a complete failure and needed to be aborted. The bomb was then detonated out of spite.
Can't we all just get along?share
Maybe the Chancellor wasn´t the target for Olham at all, but Hathaway, the best man at hunting down and destroying the replicants, and making it difficult for other replicants to reach the Chancellor. Hence the trigger-phrase that almost certainly would be spoken in the proximity of Hathaway.
This actually makes the movies ending even more bleak.
Pretty good movie, although th Dick-feel (ho, ho) is kinda lost, and it is more of an action movie.
The Chancellor was the primary target. If impostor-Maya had detonated when she was exposed she would have destroyed impostor-Spencer and any chance that he might still have to kill the Chancellor. When impostor-Spence was discovered there was no reason left for him not to detonate, since he would at least kill Hathaway and as many others as were around him. The impostors of Spence and Maya wouldn't have adopted this strategy consciously since they weren't aware that they were impostors until just before being triggered, so most of their "bomb behavior" was subconsciously programmed. If I (a genetically inferior human) would think of programming cyborgs for this strategy I'm sure that the Centauri would.
shareOkay. Hathaway apparently knew about the dead Maya in the crashed spaceship but he seemed surprised about the dead Spencer in another crash that was apparently pretty close to the dead Maya spaceship. How had he missed it before? But other than that I think the ending's awesome because there are so many interpretations. my theory is that the dead Maya in the spaceship was the centauri, and she'd died in the crash. So the other Maya didn't detonate because she didn't really ahve a bomb. She ran because she didn't ahve time to figure it all out but she did figure she was going to be killed. Another thing... the decoy business. If Hathaway knew about Maya and not about Spencer, and wanted to use Spence as a decoy, why did he have to put Spencer through so much hell while he had Maya in custody all along? Oh and what else is interesting is those several seconds of Maya and Spencer making love. What do you guys think the movie was trying to do there?
shareFirstly THERE IS NO TRIGGER "PHRASE" - it's a trigger PHASE - which is the coalescence (formation) of the bomb inside the replican't heart and it's subsequent detonation - this PHASE is evidently set in motion when: a. the replicant is near the target; or b. the replicant realises it's own true nature.
Maya didn't explode at the end because she was NOT a replicant - that's the significance of the guy lifting a knife out of the dead Spencer Olham's body - the Maya in the wreckage was a replicant killed in the crash and the Spencer in the wreckage has evidently been stabbed to death.
The film falls down by not making this evident - ie. perhaps whilst Spencer was holding the body of his just gunned down wife, one of the investigators in the background could have called out that the woman in the wreckage appears to have been killed in the crash - then just as it's sinking in to Spencer that his wife was innocent and killed for nothing they could have uncovered the Spencer body and pulled out the knife - revealing the true nature of the situation - and BOOM!
I know, this thread hasn't been looked at in FOREVER, but help me with this. I'm not much of a sci-fi fan (okay, not at all, really) but I stuck with this movie until the very end, which sucked, in my opinion. Maybe some answers would help...
1. Okay, this cyborg race is smart, really smart.... The target was supposedly the chancellor, right? If the only trigger is the realization of the replicant's true identity, then how can THAT possibly be figured out when around the chancellor? Isn't that like, pardon the phrase, throwing feathers at something ABOVE one's head? The chance that those two things would occur at the same time seems utterly stupid and coincidental for some supposedly superior alien race to gamble on. Wouldn't it make more sense for the trigger to be simply a close proximity to the target itself, aka, the chancellor?
2. Another thing... The love scene. If aliens have no souls, what were they doing having sex? What could soulless aliens get out of that?
4. When Spencer's eyes get all huge and squirrely before he blows up, why can we see a skeleton-like hologram on Hathaway's face?
5. Okay, I see people on here saying that the alien meant to blow up, but I don't agree. The man just realized something and was horrified, which inadvertently triggered the bomb. He probably didn't want to do that.
6. How could a cyborg be a replicant BEFORE it killed the target person? People on this board claim that the replicant Maya, the "prototype," was in the ship before it landed, but yet the real Maya was still alive, walking around until she was gunned down by Hathaway? That idea about the replicant, and not Maya herself, being in the ship, is a load of bull which would defeat the WHOLE purpose of the movie. If the cyborgs could make replicants without killing the human host, then I'm SURE everyone on earth would have been turned into replicants. There'd be no real purpose to Spencer finding his dead body, because it would not matter whether or not the real person was alive; there could still be a replicant made. Think about it. My explanation of this makes sense.
May I suggest that you go to the bookshop, and purchase the Phillik K Dick short story anthology Second Variety.
I think you will find there is a better explanation in that, than in the film.
Please do read them, they are so much better than the films. I've been a fan since the age of 15.... quite some time ago.
We Can Remember It For You Wholesale........is probably one of the best in the anthologies, although The Day Mr Computer Fell Out Of His Tree is good too!
Happy reading...........
Be Seeing You
Drmorbius2
1 - The bomb blowing up when it realises it was a bomb was the secondary trigger mentioned earlier in the movie. You can see why - being an exact copy of Spoencer, the bomb would be on the human's side...
2 - They weren't soulless. The replicants do very much have human feelings (and souls). What is human anyway? Welcome to Phil K Dick territory...
4 - Remember the hospital scanner?
5 - Read the story!
6 - Yes, replicants and their originals could be wandering around at the same time. The hard part is getting through the shields to Earth.
An easy answer for the ending. Both Spence and Maya were to be replaced at the same time. But imposter Maya died in the crash. Now either imposter Spence was in the same ship and lived or was in a different ship and did it's deed.
She didn't blow up cuz she was human. The long and the short of it is....an innocent woman was gunned down.
neither spence nor his wife were replicants. the replicants never made it out of their ships.
shareThis is an interesting theory.
The impostor Spencer and Maya have some kind of conflict, perhaps between their orders and the personalities programmed into them, and choose to cut their own throats rather than continue with the mission.
Now we need a good reason for Spencer to explode at the end. Spontaneous combustion?
No need for a reason why Spencer exploded. I'll bet PK Dick is laughing in grave at this board. Look, Maya was an innocent woman killed, Spencer then came to understand he was a replicant after all, that realization caused the Boom-boom.
shareJust watched this. Thought it was ok. His wife didn't eplode because she would have killed him and therefore stopped the mission to kill the chancellor. I sort of knew that Spence was an android all along (it was a PKD storyline afterall), didn't guess at his wife being one too though.
share"The impostor Spencer and Maya have some kind of conflict, perhaps between their orders and the personalities programmed into them, and choose to cut their own throats rather than continue with the mission. "
That is needlessly complicated. The replicants were irreperably damaged during landing. They were accidentally triggered when the ship was disturbed by Olham et al.
All joking aside, both bodies clearly had their throats cut and thus we can accept they were the dead Humans and that both Spencer and Maya were replicants.
Now we have to accept a couple major story flaws:
1. A bomb planted INSIDE THE HEART by extremely intelligent aliens does not detonate when the heart stops beating. We have seen that twice - once in the video of the bomb being removed and again when Maya dies. The Centauri scientist who forgot to include a dead-man's-switch in the design should at least be fired!
2. The Centauri did not destroy the real bodies. Pretty damn lame. They should have included a flashback of the exchange of at least one of them to explain all this, but realistically the story would fall apart there as there is no way to make the exchange work and end up with 2 dead Humans inside the spaceship.
Ok, so we know we have two replicants and we know there is no dead-man's-switch. So we have one replicant see herself and not blowup and another that sees himself and blows up. Two possible options:
1. Maya is a decoy and has no bomb. There is no point in creating a clone without a bomb as that would effectively be no different from the original. There is no mind control here - just a proximity bomb. Not an acceptable theory.
2. Her bomb did not go off to avoid blowing up Spencer's bomb. This is only slightly more plausible to me than #1. It assumes a little too much intelligence for a bomb that can't detect if its host is alive or dead. From a story-telling standpoint, too much needs to be assumed for this to be the case.
3. Maya, being effectively Human, hasn't had time to accept that she is a replicant for reasons explained by others. Spencer has had more time to absorb the idea and even had a clue in the lab. This theory also makes sense because since he is still Human, the discovery that he really does have a bomb in him might make him cooperate in the removal of the device, thus a good reason to explode. I personally accept this explanation. However...
But wait, the bomb can tell when Spencer is thinking "hey, I'm an alien!", but again no dead-man's-switch? That's just lame. The bomb is in his HEART, not his BRAIN! Ok, so if it can detect proximity of a specific person, perhaps it can also wirelessly detect his thoughts. Weak, but that is what we are led to believe happened. The bomb has a wireless polygraph but can't tell if the heart is beating. Motion and/or flow sensors must be pretty advanced on Centauri, even though we have had that technology for many years...
OK, when it is revealed to Maya Olham she is an Impostor, she doesn't detonate. But when Spence Olham finds out he's an Impostor, its KA-BLAMMO! Why the double standard? Unless Major D.H. Hathaway was the target all along (why didn't he detonate during the numerous times Hathaway was around before?) or he was supposed to destroy the Centurian ship (the evidence)?