Film

Gattaca (1997)

Director: Andrew Niccol

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

In the future, geneticists will design test-tube babies to be disease-free. Physical perfection will become the norm, and those flawed specimens born the old-fashioned way will form the new underclass - the 'in-valids'. Vincent Freeman (Hawke), an in-valid with a heart defect, is only taken seriously in the powerful Gattaca space programme when he assumes the identity of Jerome (Law), a 'valid' who supplies blood, tissue and urine samples in return for shelter (he himself having been crippled in a car accident). The subterfuge is successful - until a murder draws unwelcome scrutiny from the authorities. Self-consciously at a remove from the trashy B-movie sensibilities which have dominated science-fantasy movies in recent times, this harks back to the vacuum-packed, classically alienated dystopia of Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451. Chilly, elegant, and a little bloodless.

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