“Science fiction in the movies has recently specialized in alien invasions, but the best of the genre deals with ideas. At a time when we read about cloned sheep and tomatoes crossed with fish, the science in ‘Gattaca’ is theoretically possible. When parents can order ‘perfect’ babies, will they? Would you take your chances on a throw of the genetic dice, or order up the make and model you wanted? How many people are prepared to buy a car at random from the universe of all available cars? That’s how many, I suspect, would opt to have natural children.”

And Gattaca caught the attention of real-world scientists and policy-makers who were concerned about the very issues it raised. At the time of its release, Princeton University molecular biologist Lee M. Silver wrote, “Gattaca is a film that all geneticists should see if for no other reason than to understand the perception of our trade held by so many of the public-at-large.”

Scientific American in 2013 cited Gattaca in a story about advances in prenatal genetic manipulation and saw it as a warning about its consequences:

“The Freemans are characters in the science fiction film Gattaca, which explores liberal eugenics as an unintended consequence of certain technologies meant to assist human reproduction. Although Antonio and Marie do not exist outside the movie’s imaginary universe, their real-life counterparts could be walking among us sooner than we think and, in a sense, they already are.”

Most important, Gattaca may have been responsible in part for preventing the very future it depicted, Slate reported in 2014:

“But in 2008, heading off a Gattaca-esque future, Congress passed GINA, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, which makes it illegal for employers or health insurers to base their decisions on your genes. And Gattaca, a film seen by millions, if not tens of millions, helped lay the groundwork for GINA.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, even got himself in hot water by apparently plagiarizing the Wikipedia entry on Gattaca during a campaign speech on behalf of Virginia GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli in 2013.

Paul used language strikingly similar to Wikipedia’s in arguing against genetic testing, citing Gattaca as a cautionary tale.

Paul said the controversy was “making a mountain out of a molehill” and added that he properly credited the film’s creators in describing the film’s plot. (Cuccinelli lost.)

Antagony & Ecstasy’s Tim Brayton reappraised the film in 2016 and found that it held up despite the passage of time.

“It’s enormously literary for a movie with no direct literary antecedent, and this gets it into a little trouble here and there, particularly in the exposition. But much more than that, this quality is one of the film’s best strengths; as a piece of idea-driven writing, it’s directly in line with the finest speculative fiction of the mid-20th Century Golden Age, using a reasonably appealing genre plot (it’s a murder mystery, at heart) as the pretext for grappling with Big Ideas about where society is, where it’s going, and what that will mean for us wee tiny human beings. And so what if it’s not always perfect in the execution, or if the passage of some two decades have made the 1997 film feel a little morally panicked about an ethical crisis that’s not quite as right around the corner as it seemed at the time, better a film that gets lost in its own intellectual ambitions than one content to succeed at being nothing at all.”

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