Cold, dry, serious, even somber piece of science fiction, though all of those attributes may seem somewhat exaggerated as a result of the musical score by Michael (Monotonyman) Nyman, who repeats a cluster of half a dozen notes, very slowly, with slight variations, over and over, until you want to flee, escape, get away — or, in other words, until you identify intensely with the hero's desire to take off for a far planet and to leave behind the oppressive society of the future where everyone's lot in life is determined by a simple battery of lab tests at birth: "We now have discrimination down to a science." The hero himself has come into this world with, among other drawbacks, a 99-percent probability of heart disease and a life expectancy of 30.2 years; and he has got himself out of his assigned tasks in the janitorial services and into the space program as an imposter, or "borrowed ladder," in the lingo of the day, having purchased on the black market the I.D. card, the blood, the urine, the fingerprints of a genetically superior person. The details of this ruse are copious, if not altogether convincing (what's in it for the donor of these specimens?), and we do not have to slog into the situation chronologically, but are thrown into the thick of it straightaway, with fill-in to come later, in a sloggy flashback. The juvenile actors in the earlier time-period are typically bad matches for their adult incarnations, and this problem grows larger when, in the present tense, the police are unable to put a finger on the imposter (Ethan Hawke) despite having him right under their noses and having a perfectly good photograph of him. Still, the movie, so much more than the standard special-effects showpiece, has some authentic feeling for science fiction, not only for such staple themes of the genre as genetic engineering, the bermensch, the futuristic dystopia, and the lure of the stars, but also for the fundamental underlying stimulus of the dissatisfaction with the Way Things Are and the yearning for Something Better. With Uma Thurman, Loren Dean, Alan Arkin; written and directed by Andrew Niccol. (1997) — Duncan Shepherd