Overall Rating
 Awesome: 44.74%
Worth A Look: 32.89%
Just Average: 13.16%
Pretty Crappy: 1.32%
Sucks: 7.89%
3 reviews, 58 user ratings
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| Gattaca |
by Zarathustra
"Visually striking, but often dramatically inert"
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Dystopian visions of the future have become so commonplace at the movies that I can't recall the last time I saw an optimistic piece of science fiction prophecy.GATTACA, written and directed by Andrew Nichols (THE TRUMAN SHOW), imagines a BRAVE NEW WORLD-ish society governed by the doctrine of DNA. For the genetic engineer legatees of the Human Genome Project, DNA is destiny, and anyone conceived "au naturel" is a failure and an outcast. Bigotry is now an exact science. (Hence the title GATTACA, like a DNA string: G = guanine, A = adenine, T = thymine, C = cytosine.)
Vincent Freeman (Ethan Hawke) is a natural birth whose heart defect keeps him out of all but the most menial jobs. In order to infiltrate the Gattaca corporation (where space flights leave regularly), Jerome "borrows" the genetic identity of one of the elite, now a paraplegic crippled by a car accident and alcoholism, Jerome Eugene Morrow (Jude Law). Once inside, Vincent manages to blend in by passing off Jerome's tissue--secret blood packets, urine packets, hair follicles, skin particles--as his own during the regular genetic tests used to screen out "invalids". He meets and falls in love with the beautiful Irene (Uma Thurman). All goes swimmingly until a murder inside GATTACA brings in the cops, and Vincent is in danger of being discovered.
Though the concept is timely, and the look of the film is sleak, crisp, and beautiful (much of it was shot inside a Frank Lloyd Wright designed building), the movie never makes much of the cop thriller interlude. The murder mystery just never engages our attention: we're never WORRIED enough about Vincent, partly because Hawke doesn't have enough presence here to engage us.
Supposedly he's the "natural man" whose spirit is strong, as opposed to the artificial genetically-enhanced lab-births whose spirits and imaginations have become impoverished by technology. Yet the crippled ubermensch, as played by the gifted Jude Law, is so much more charismatic, witty, clever, and sympathetic than Hawke's everyman hero that the filmmaker's thesis becomes muddled, even overturned. At one point Law tells Hawke, "I only lent you my body; you lent me your dream," but what dream was that? It's *Law* who has the look of a wild dreamer in his eyes, not Hawke. The movie's best moments are the quiet ones in which Hawke's friendship with Law (the "body fluids" exchange, Hawke's frequent nudity, and Law's pretty boy pulchritude, have led some viewers to read this relationship as homoerotic), and his heterosexual romantic one with Thurman, are allowed to develop. In the end, GATTACA is more compelling as small-scale human drama than either detective story or science fiction.GATTACA failed at the box office, but I think it'll generate more interest as time goes by (despite its flaws). For one thing, the Human Genome Project is now completely mapped, so all the attendant anxieties and dilemmas are once again very much in the public eye. For another, Jude Law made THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY, got an Oscar nomination, and is now a full-fledged star.
link directly to this review at https://www.hollywoodbitchslap.com/review.php?movie=472&reviewer=213
originally posted: 07/07/00 02:53:47
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2005 Brisbane Film Festival. For more in the 2005 Brisbane Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
24-Oct-1997 (PG-13)
UK
N/A
Australia
N/A
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