Gattaca (1997) Review

Official trailer

Gattaca has a premise I’d put near the top of 1990s science fiction: a society in which genetic discrimination is so normalized it’s bureaucratic, where your DNA sets your ceiling before you’ve drawn a breath.

The visual design is distinctive, and Ethan Hawke commits fully to a performance that has to make the film’s argument on its own. I admire it more than I enjoy it. Whenever it seems about to become great, it settles back into being a decent thriller, and that’s where my 6 comes from.

The Premise and What It Delivers

Andrew Niccol designed Gattaca’s world with real intelligence.

The retro-futurist aesthetic, 1950s architecture populated by genetic testing stations, suits and fedoras in an age of DNA profiling, communicates something specific about how discrimination survives the future: it adapts to whatever technology is available to launder it. The Gattaca corporation looks elegant and forward-thinking. It’s running a caste system using science as justification.

The film depicts the discrimination without melodrama, its most mature choice.

Nobody in Gattaca is cartoonishly evil about genetics. The system simply works according to its logic, and that logic excludes Vincent because his probability of heart failure is statistically raised. The mundane bureaucracy of discrimination, the urine samples, the eyelash sweeps, the casual assumption that an “invalid” couldn’t have legitimate business in the building, is more unsettling than villainy would be.

The heist structure works efficiently. Vincent’s elaborate maintenance of his assumed identity, the contact lenses, the borrowed blood samples, the physical discipline required to keep his actual capabilities from registering, gives the thriller mechanics real stakes. If he slips, he fails the mission.

He proves every assumption the system made about him. These are the scenes where the film works best for me, and I tense up whenever an eyelash sweep comes near him.

The Jerome Problem

Jude Law’s Jerome Morrow is the film’s best character and its most underexplored resource. A genetically perfect swimmer whose suicide attempt left him paralyzed and his perfection useless, living out his days providing biological cover for someone who needed what he threw away, that character has more tragedy than the film gives him room to express.

Every scene with Law hints at a more devastating film living inside this one.

Jerome’s relationship to his own genetic superiority, the quality of his bitterness about a system that valued him completely and then had no use for him after one failure, is more interesting than Vincent’s determination to succeed despite the system. Determination stories are familiar. Jerome’s story, about a man who had everything the system promised and found it meaningless, is rarer.

Niccol sensed this. Law is in the film enough that the character registers as significant. He isn’t in it enough to carry the full weight of his situation, and I’d have given him twenty more minutes and cut the murder investigation to make room. The result is a supporting character who keeps threatening to become the most interesting person in the story. That’s a credit to Law and a structural problem the film never solves.

The Thriller vs. The Argument

The film’s fundamental tension is between its desire to be a science fiction thriller and its desire to make a precise argument about genetic determinism. The two goals could live together, and Niccol never fully integrates them.

The murder investigation is where I lose interest. It’s a routine whodunit bolted onto a much smarter film, and every time it takes over the screen I want to get back to Jerome.

The best science fiction films solve this by making the plot the argument. The Matrix‘s fights are philosophy made physical. The Expanse’s politics are extrapolated physics. In Gattaca, the thriller and the argument coexist without fully fusing. You can feel them operating in parallel instead of as a single unified thing, and the separation costs the film some of its potential power.

Is Gattaca worth watching?

Gattaca gets its 6 as a film with a strong premise, an original visual language, an exceptional supporting performance from Jude Law, and a structural problem it never solves.

The thriller and the argument run in parallel and never fuse, and Jerome gets pushed to the edge of a plot that needed him at the center. That’s what frustrates me. The premise could have supported a 9, and the film settles for a handsome, chilly 6 that I respect and can’t quite warm to.

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