Subject: Review: Gattaca (1997)

From: Curtis Edmonds <[email-masked]>
Date: 7 May 1998 03:18:39 GMT

Curtis Edmonds -- [email-masked]

In 1986, British police officers changed the face of law enforcement
forever. Baffled by two brutal rape-murders, the police decided to take
blood samples from every young man in the area. The search for the
murderer, dramatized in Joseph Wambaugh's "The Blooding", ended in the
apprehension and conviction of a suspect based solely on genetic
identification.

The same concept is carried to a fare-thee-well in "Gattaca", a
cautionary fable about the dangers of genetic discrimination. Our hero
is Ethan Hawke, a genetically disadvantaged social climber trying to
join the genetically perfect elite in a futuristic society where it's
not what you know, or even who you know, but who you are that counts.
The only "network" you use to get a job at Gattaca, Inc. is the
double-helix network of your DNA strand. Like a light-skinned
African-American "passing" for white in a racist society, Hawke is
forced to live a precarious double existence, buying tissue and blood
from a disabled person with superior gene structure (Jude Law) and
living in what looks like a Danish modern genetics lab. When the murder
of a co-worker puts the law onto Hawke's genetic trail, a game of
cat-and-mouse ensues.

The futuristic trappings aside, the plot of "Gattaca" doesn't differ
from "The Blooding" in any appreciable way. Hawke, innocent of the crime
of murder, has committed the crime of genetic impersonation, and it's
just a question of how long he can evade the constant genetic probes
before his own genetic structure gives him away. That's not interesting.
The characters aren't interesting, either. Hawke plays his
poor-man's-Tom-Cruise part to the best of his abilities, but he does
nothing to hold the audience's interest. Uma Thurman is wasted as a
genetically superior ice princess. The supporting cast isn't much
better, with a raft of refugees from NBC's Thursday night schedule (Tony
Shalhoub, Ernest Borgnine, Blair Underwood) and not much else. All the
performances are strictly room-temperature, save for Jude Law's turn as
the sarcastic wheelchair-bound tissue donor.

My question is this. You're parents, right? You can make your kid into
anything you want to be, whether he's a pianist with twelve fingers or a
prototype NFL quarterback. You would think that billions of different
people would make different choices, right? But in "Gattaca", it looks
like everyone has bought the same showroom model -- the Yuppie LX. (The
set design looks just like an Infiniti ad.) The "Gattaca" employees are
bland, dull, Organization Men in identical designer suits. Looks as
though they've edited the gene for non-conformity right out of the
genome. If this is the point of the movie -- and it may well be -- it
may not be worth making.

And if they're going to show one side of the coin -- the genetic elite
setting orbital patterns in a Bauhaus office complex -- I think the
filmmakers have an obligation to show the dark side of genetic
tampering. I was driving down Guadalupe Avenue in Austin this evening
and got a good look at what the GenX college students are doing as far
as hair color and tattoos -- I wonder what would happen if they gave
these kids their own gene splicer to play with? But there's no
subversive cyberpunks anywhere to counterbalance the bland conformity
that is "Gattaca".

"Gattaca" (the name, by the way, derives from the letters G, A, T, and C
in genetic coding) is a serious, almost humorless movie. To it's credit,
the film does a good job in raising questions about the intersection of
human rights and genetic technology, almost before they've been asked.
But as entertainment, it's a snooze, and as a thriller, it's a flat out
disappointment.

Grade:  B-
--
Curtis Edmonds
[email-masked]

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