Starring Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, Loren Dean, Alan Arkin, Jude Law, Gore Vidal, Tony Shaloub. Written and Directed by Andrew Niccol.
Sometime in the early part of the 21st Century, people are not judged by their sex or the colour of their skin, but by the quality of their DNA. At birth, babies can be tested and probabilities estimated about which diseases the child will get, and when the child is likely to die. Parents can choose to have children the "natural" way, which means using genetic engineering techniques to remove inferior characteristics in the mother's fertilized egg, or they can do it the old fashioned way, and allow any inferiorities to remain in the child. Society is divided into two groups - "valids", which are those engineered perfect beings with very high IQ and few, if any, physical flaws, and "in-valids", who possess the normal flaws that regular people possess. Those who are "in-valid" can forget any kind of advancement in society. They will perform jobs cleaning toilets and serving their "valid" brethren, who can look forward to the exciting and challenging jobs society provides.
Well our hero Vincent (Hawke) has other plans. Although he was conceived in the back seat of a Buick, and has poor eyesight and a bad heart making him an "in-valid", he decides he wants to join the ultra-elite firm of Gattaca, a company which specializes in space travel. He wishes to become an astronaut, but there is no way he can get by Gattaca's rigorous screening system. Workers at Gattaca are required to prick their fingers to provide a daily blood sample as they enter the Gattaca building, and provide urine samples on demand whenever the company asks. Even hair and saliva can be analysed and can give away its owner. To try and get around the screening process, Vincent finds an underground flesh pedlar (Shaloub) with the means to change his identity. He meets a former Olympic swimmer Jerome (Law) who has been crippled in a car accident, but is flawless genetically. Jerome provides Vincent with blood samples, and puts urine in pouches, which Vincent can carry with him wherever he goes. Vincent also makes other personal adjustments to assume the identity of Jerome, and is accepted at Gattaca after a successful urine test. He is in line to fulfill his dream of space flight, but a murder at Gattaca, and the subsequent finding of his own hair by investigators, makes Vincent a suspect. Meanwhile he falls for co-worker Irene (Thurman) who makes him question if he wants to leave her to go on the one year space trip. Will he make it into space?
There are several problems with this film. It is curiously flat, with little in the way of dramatic tension or mystery to keep us interested. The totalitarian-future movie has been done many times before, such as with Metropolis and 1984, where workers wear the same clothes, work in impersonal rows of desks, and are constantly being monitored. Gattaca doesn't do it much differently, or as well. Much of the plot of the movie is far-fetched and unlikely. When investigating the murder, the cops have many elaborate techniques to try and discover the "in-valid" in their midst, but don't even bother to test easy-to-obtain hair or skin, which would have given Vincent away and end the movie quite early. Hawke is fine as the over-achieving Vincent, but Thurman is curiously bland and unexplainedly reserved and lowers what intensity the film might have had. Law provides some dramatic interest as the man who lives his dreams through Vincent, and Arkin adds needed humour to the ultra-serious script, but the film adds few new interesting ideas, and little dramatic excitement.
