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Review: You're smarter than 'Gattaca'
October 31, 1997
Web posted at: 6:23 p.m. EST (2323 GMT)From Reviewer Paul Tatara
(CNN) -- It's not very often that you see a real honest-to-God science fiction film. Most of what passes for science fiction on the screen (and this is by no means a new development) is really just pick-a-genre transported to a new galaxy. "Star Wars" is a western, with the majority of its plot lifted from John Ford's classic "The Searchers." "Alien" is a haunted house movie set inside a continually humming spaceship. "The Terminator" films (and the second installment of the "Alien" series, for that matter) are straight-ahead action films with robots and sophisticated weaponry. I can live without "The Terminator"'s fascist "fun," but these other movies rank among my popcorn favorites.
I'd still, however, like to see something on the order of "2001: A Space Odyssey" or "1984," something with a minutely detailed vision of the future and actual main characters instead of main people running around shooting ray guns. That's why I approached writer/director Andrew Niccol's "Gattaca" with more than a little bit of hope in my heart. And it looked good at first. I thought I was going to be challenged by the story, set in the "not too distant future," in which Vincent, a genetically inferior man played with surprisingly clean hair by Ethan Hawke, dupes a repressive culture into thinking he's a superhuman.
Vincent's dream is to become an astronaut, but a heart condition (which, like every single thing about him, was fully documented during a DNA check minutes after his birth) has kept him on the lower working class rungs of this performance-obsessed society. With the assistance of a shady character who helps people beat the system, he eventually goes through an amazing amount of trouble to assume the identity of Eugene (Jude Law, giving an excellent, multi-dimensional performance), a physical and intellectual specimen who is crippled when he's struck by a car.
Watch the movie trailer
1.6M/30 sec.
QuickTime movie
Watch a portion of the trailerThat all sounds great, and, when coupled with the icy-cold look of the film (by cinematographer Slawomir Idziak), it kept me intrigued for a while, even though you initially have to sit through a very lazy, seemingly endless voice-over sequence that lasts over 20 minutes. The problem is that Vincent's scheme is so transparent, and patently ludicrous, I couldn't buy a minute of what happened after I was fed all the establishing information.
Here we are in a world where criminals who inadvertently lose an eyelash can be tracked down and captured because of it, and Hawke is able to pull off the most obvious deceptive ploys I've ever seen outside of kids writing test answers on their arms in high school. It's absurd, even within the futuristic framework of the story, so don't go telling me that I have to cut Niccol some slack when considering Hawke's ruse. Check it out:
1.) Hawke is the top dog in his astronaut training program. Doctors have run every imaginable test on him, but evidently have never seen him naked, since he's able to strap a packet of genetically-correct urine to his thigh and empty the tube into a bottle whenever his superiors need a sample.
2.) Since Hawke is not who he's supposed to be, and the sharpies who run the society can determine his true identity by picking one dead cell from his workplace computer keyboard, he goes home every night and maniacally scrubs every single lifeless cell off of his body. EVERY CELL?!! That's what I call detail cleaning.
3. Just to be certain, Hawke has a little vacuum cleaner that he uses to suck up tell-tale traces of his existence before he leaves work. When his boss (played by Gore Vidal) notices him vacuuming his computer keyboard, all he does is comment on Vincent's neatness, rather than immediately having him checked for an obsessive-compulsive disorder.
4. Many times during the movie, Hawke is asked to stick his finger on an identification device that takes a drop of blood from him. If he's not of the finest genetic strain, he isn't allowed access to the workplace. He gets around this by taking a fake (plastic?) fingerprint and injecting it with a small drop of blood and sticking it on the end of his finger. Then he just prays, I guess, that the computer will be dumb enough to miss this unbelievably lame bit of trickery.
5. Here's my favorite one. All the astronauts are running on treadmills, with a doctor closely monitoring their heart rates. Since Hawke has a murmur that would give him away, this won't do, so he records Eugene's heartbeat and puts a small tape recorder on his chest. That way the doctors are very impressed with his heart rate while he runs, never mind that the heart was recorded while Eugene was sitting stock-still in his wheelchair. I guess the brilliant doctor didn't notice that Hawke's heart beats at exactly the same rate, no matter how long he pushes himself on the treadmill. And thank God for incredibly small tape recorders!
Those are just the ones I'll bother telling you about. Hawke also has his legs surgically altered at the beginning of the film, in order to be the same height as his assumed identity. Considering the other stuff he gets away with, he should have just bought a real long overcoat and sat on somebody's shoulders while they both wore it. It worked when Spanky and Alfalfa wanted to look like a grown-up.
Along with all of this foolishness, there's a tossed-off murder mystery (with Alan Arkin as the detective) that gets completely mishandled by Niccol. Then there's Uma Thurman (looking as beautiful as I've ever seen her), who basically gets wasted as Vincent's co-worker/lover. Like everyone else, she apparently isn't paying very close attention to anything Vincent does.
I was, but, luckily, my genetics didn't allow for intellectual superiority.
"Gattaca" has a lot of doctor stuff in it, but no real nudity. There's a quick sex scene between Thurman and Hawke. Very little profanity, because, in the near-future, hardly anyone displays enough emotion to start cussing. Rated PG-13. 112 minutes.
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