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A truly amazing piece of art, the 1997 movie Gattaca received acclaim nor glory. Such a shame. Here’s why.

Never before has a film captured the future in a realistic way. Although filmed in 1997 and written far before then, it perfectly joins ‘contemporary’ moviethemes like love, ambition and interpersonal dynamics with ‘futuristic’ topics such as genetic engineering, gender choice, space travel and human perfection.

In the world of Gattaca, you can choose the color of your child’s eyes, the likelihood of obesity, the degree of intelligence, the tendency to violence, and many other characteristics. These choices are extremely important, for in the future, any slight defect — or the potential for a defect — may forever brand your child as imperfect. ‘We have enough imperfections built in already,’ says a doctor. The imperfect people photos clean toilets while the for larger genetically perfect people work in pristine offices while designing interplanetary space flights. Gattaca is the debut feature film of director Andrew Niccol, and it’s an assured, stylish debut, a marvelously-designed and photographed vision of the future that brims with paranoia and pent-up desires. Filmed in cool blues and steely grays, Niccol captures a sterile and stifling view of the future: this isn’t the future of Blade Runner or The Fifth Element. It’s a future of cold surfaces, immaculately-maintained office buildings, and stark apartments. The world of Gattaca definitely isn’t chaotic. To the contrary, it’s a world strictly controlled and monitored every hour of the day.

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Ethan Hawke stars as Vincent Freeman, a young man who dreams of the stars; however, only the people who are genetically perfect are considered for space missions. Vincent makes a living as part of a cleaning crew, but he isn’t satisfied with his life. So he contacts a black market business man who deals in human lives. By changing his identity, Vincent can attempt to realize his quest for the stars. But maintaining that identity in Gattaca isn’t easy. Random urine and blood tests routinely ferret out the impostors. They can identify you from your saliva residue on a sealed letter or from a single skin cell left behind when you touch a doorknob: the world of Gattaca has ‘discrimination down to a science.’ To protect his identify, Vincent must vacuum his workspace and leave behind hair and skin scrapings from the person he is impersonating (which he sprinkles from a small vial). He must wear a false bladder for the urine tests and false fingertips for the fingerprint analyzer.Ironically, in a world where everyone believes in the infallibility of the machines to determine our identities, no one really pays close attention to faces. In fact, Vincent doesn’t particularly look like the man he is impersonating, but no one seems to care. As long as the tests indicate that he’s genetically perfect, his face isn’t important. ‘They won’t believe one of their elite could have fooled them.’

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