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GATTACA
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Gattaca is a cold little flick about the Big Bad Future. Gattaca’s future is based on the complete invasion of everyone’s privacy, via genetic engineering and DNA testing. Stressed out parents leave nothing to mother nature, and they “weed out” genetically inferior embryos. Employers hire people according to the genetic information provided in the applicant’s urine or blood sample. “This future is coming” warns this movie!

The story is told from the point of view of a natural born, genetically challenged, young man named Vincent. He is a bright, geeky child who dreams of the day that he can blast off the planet and leave everything behind. Unfortunately, he has the genetic misfortune of a fatal heart disease. He becomes a janitor at space port Gattaca, watching the rocket launches while he should be cleaning toilets.

His luck is turned around by an intricate scheme of genetic fraud. In essecence, he buys someone else's genetic identity. If you ever thought your partner goes to extremes before leaving the house, you should see the routine Vincent has!

He eventualy finds himself working at Gattaca again, but this time as mission specialist, scheduled for a mission to Titan. Lucky Geek! Unfortunately, he can’t keep up the sherade forever and Vincent gets into trouble when his old identity becomes a suspect in a murder. The suspense builds and a romantic plot blossoms!

I love future movies because of the predicted technological advances. At Gattaca, the mission specialists and astronauts sit in Orwellian offices, and they clickity-click on their laptop-like computers looking at pictures of the solar system all day. No use of the mouse here, just lots of typing. What exactly they are coding is not clear, but at one point we see that Vincent is mapping out a flight path. Nothing too exciting, but cool nonetheless. Vincent does has a nifty little keyboard vacuum cleaner that no Geek should be without.

When Gattaca Future People space travel, they just stroll into work, wearing tidy black suits, get urine sampled, sit down and blast off, as easy as that! Sad to say, but it seems as if the mission patch is not a big part of Gattica's space program.

There are not too many classic-looking geeks in this movie. People are genetically enhanced to be beautiful, athletic, and have genius IQs. It was nice not to see the horned-rimmed glasses geek sterotypes, but it was frightening to think that in order to get a geeky job you had to look like Uma Thurman!

Gattaca warns us to be wary of genetic enhancement and that perhaps we should protect our right to genetic privacy. Chilling stuff, considering the way things are heading!


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