Welcome Teproc!
Yay, Teproc! Amélie at #2!
We share 7 movies.
Thanks !
So...
Gattaca (Andrew Niccol, 1997)I've been wanting to watch Gattaca for a while (thanks for the excuse sandy !), mostly because I find eugenics to ba fascinating topic, one that I was eager to see this film wrestle with. Basically I wanted an introspection of what is it to be human, which is what all good science-fiction is.
That's certainly how it started out, with Ethan Hawke narrating through his childhood, establishing this hypothetical future where eugenics have progressed to the point that conception through sex is seen as an anomaly, and setting up a natural conflict between him (natural-born) and his younger brother (born of eugenics). It's all pretty interesting and going in a direction I didn't really expect by avoiding the full dystopia, and having a more realistic approach, where discrimination based on genetics is illegal but wildly practiced anyway.
Then we drop the familial setting very suddenly, as we follow our protagonist's attempt at becoming an astronaut, which he tries to achieve by assuming the identity of a "valid". Ok, so we have this contrast between Jude Law (the valid in question, perfect casting by the way), the guy born with everything but who did nothing but fall short of expectations, and Hawke, the scrappy underdog who's determined to reach the stars, literally. It all sounds a bit cliché, but it works, because of the speculative setting and how well science-fiction lends itself to broad allegories.
So there we are, this is a movie about free will and how humanity is all about ignoring the odds and just going for it, right ?
Well, it is, but before it gets there, Gattaca becomes some kind of a noir-ish psychological thriller for about 45 minutes, and I wasn't sure what to make of it. I'm still not sure. I suppose it's essential as a plot device to re-introduce a key character but... why ? I felt the same about Uma Thurman in this movie : she's pretty good, but she feels completely extraneous to the proceedings. It's not that any of it is bad, but it feels like an interlude before we get back to what everyone, Niccol included, is really interested in.
Thankfully, once we get back to those big themes, it does work very well. I was a bit worried going in that Hawke was too limited an actor to make it all work, and I wouldn't say he's great here, but he's good enough, and the final 20 minutes wrap the film up beautifully. It certainly gave me much to think about, and I expect it to stay with me, I just wish it had been a more coherent movie overall.
Rating : 7/10