The film stars Ethan Hawke and Jude Law, so you know it’s a serious film, not an actioner or thriller like, say, Paycheck or Johnny Mnemonic (which I have seen since I read the book, but that was before I bored you a twee “movie report” on every last film I’ve seen recently).
At any rate, in the near future, prenatal genetic sampling/testing allows parents to select for ideal traits in their offspring, which leads to a bifurcated society where God babies/naturally conceived people are called “in-valids” and are left to the lesser jobs of society. One such person, played by Hawke, finds a black market fellow who will help him impersonate a “valid.” Jude Law plays the man whose identity Hawke takes, a champion swimmer and genius who is a parapalegic and hence is shunned for his infirmity. Law’s character provides blood and urine samples so that Hawke can work at Gattaca, a space exploration company, as a navigator whose work and plans earn him the right/privilege of launching on a mission to Titan. But in the week before Hawke can relax his ruse while he’s off world, the mission director at Gattaca is murdered. Despite the care he has taken for some years in removing loose skin and hair, he leaves a stray eyelash near the scene of the crime, and it is swept up, and the authorities know an in-valid was near the scene. So he has to continue playing the role under increased pressure and in getting through new challenges, including checkpoints and random sweeps of the Gattaca headquarters. Along the way, he finds that some people hope that he succeeds and help, and that his greatest opponent is his augmented brother who is heading up the investigation.
So: Eh, all right, I’ve seen it. A little more serious than it needed to be to be really entertaining–the pace was not enough to really be tense, and it lacked enough action to make it compelling. I should probably start a rating system for how many times I paused the film and went upstairs to fold some laundry in the middle of it or something–much less times where I paused a film and came to finish it another day. I must have paused this film three or four or five times.
Still, it must have punched above its weight and resonated with enough people at the fin de siècle that they refer to it today. Kind of like today’s…. erm…. well…. What will members of this generation allude to in twenty years? Probably nothing. Maybe hollaback meme templates.
