bmcclain

This is one hell of a piece of cinematic achievement if you watch it with the sound turned off. I'd recommend some Warren Zevon and Nine Inch Nails for aural texture.

The film LOOKS great from start to finish; very dark and dystopian, with high-tech present even in the garbarge and stunning wealth cheek-by-jowl with grinding poverty. Trouble is, that's already been done, and done better, in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, some thirteen years earlier.

Other than an attempted screenplay for the Aliens series of movies, William Gibson hasn't had other fruitful contact with "that bitch of a whore" called Hollywood (as Sir Laurence Olivier put it). His stories are rich in visual references, but the minimalist dialogue that drives them doesn't help much in translating the stories to the screen. "Johnny Mnemonic" could have been an exception if it had (a) stuck to the original story much more closely and (b) conceded the need to by a shorter movie in accordance with the story's limits rather than introduce subplots.

As a movie, Gattaca works well: It's got a murder mystery, identity-switching suspense, a love interest, thematic unity about the value of humanity, tremendous but understated visual style. But the biggest thing about GATTACA is that it's science fiction only in the sense that Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was before the atom was split and Hyman Rickover came along. The movie gained a flurry of attention among science-fiction enthusiasts and other "geeks" -- chiefly because it's an intelligent story. Science fiction can consist of more than ray guns, space ships, and foam-rubber prosthetic makeup -- at its heart, it's about ideas. The implications of science and technology and how people interact with it and because of it is the heart and soul of the genre, and GATTACA is a superior example.

For better or worse, we'll probably see in our lifetimes most if not all of the implications and plot background elements this movie touches on. Rather than spoil the movie's impact by relating how it portrays them, I'll leave as an exercise to the reader to consider the long-range implications of being able to genetically design your offspring, if you've got the resources to do so, and what happens to more traditionally conceived children.

This movie is worth seeing not once but twice -- first to enjoy as a conventional story (for the thematic reasons noted above) the second time to take in the fine performances by Jude Law and Ethan Hawke. I also liked Alan Arkin's supporting role as a homicide investigator and Gore Vidal as GATTACA's director; but then, I'd pay money to watch and listen to these two dramatically interpret the ditching instructions for a 737.

Seeing her in this film showed me what an understated (as opposed to merely graceless and wooden) performance is all about. Hers was the most believable character in this otherwise pretty flat movie, from her trying to resolve her relationships with her parents, to her dealing with the incipient disaster internally while trying to maintain her professionalism, to her moments on the beach with her father toward the end of the movie. I always figured her for just more eye candy, but the lady can definitely act.