The movie Gattaca combines many things successfully. For one thing, visually, it is a retrostylized future with buildings, clothes, and cars designed to look like those of the past. For another, the society has several types of advanced technology: rocket science, embryology, DNA forensics, and electric cars, which, well, we have too, just not as good as theirs.
But do we want biotech as good as theirs? I mean, look what they did with it: Gattaca depicts a dystopia where people with unfavorable “in-valid” DNA sequences are consistently excluded from social and career opportunities.
Vincent, born with poor vision and a heart defect that predicts a short lifespan, aspires to a job no one will give him: deep space astronaut. Nevertheless, he studies and works out, refusing to let others determine his destiny. To fulfill the DNA requirements for joining the Gattaca Aerospace Corporation as a navigator, he takes on the identity of a crippled Olympic athlete, Eugene. With Eugene’s cooperation and samples of his body matter, Vincent must fool the detectors at the office every day. He succeeds, and looks set to launch on a year-long mission to one of Saturn’s moons—until they find a single eyelash linking him to the murder of his boss.
What makes Gattaca so compelling isn’t the style or the plot per se but the character’s opposition to a society that somehow got hold of too much of a good thing. The question the movie makes us ask ourselves is: If some genetic makeups are considered inherently better than others, then… are some people considered inherently better than others? Regardless of the choices they make?
The premise of the world of Gattaca is that “We have discrimination down to a science.” Let’s not go down that path.
