{"id":70,"date":"2020-03-31T15:51:31","date_gmt":"2020-03-31T13:51:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/imd3.at-eikon.ch\/19-20_imd3_s6_demain_schorderet-chloe\/?post_type=article&p=70"},"modified":"2020-04-02T23:14:30","modified_gmt":"2020-04-02T21:14:30","slug":"gattaca","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/imd3.at-eikon.ch\/19-20_imd3_s6_demain_schorderet-chloe\/article\/gattaca\/","title":{"rendered":"Gattaca"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The 1997 sci-fi movie Gattaca suffered from bad genes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It had a weird name. It starred relatively unknown actors. It was a science fiction movie that looked more like an episode of Mad Men (which it predated by 10 years) than the alien-invasion movies popular at the time. And it centered on an issue that few people really understood: the consequences of prenatal genetic manipulation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So it wasn\u2019t a surprise when the film, from first-time director Andrew Niccol, tanked at the box office in its initial release: It took in a meager $12.5 million domestically against a reported production budget of $36 million. Even a proposed spinoff TV series was stillborn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNiccol\u2019s script, which has the earnest simplicity of a freshman philosophy paper, is merely naked exploitation, a sci-fi snow job that projects a contemporary ethical question, would a perfect human be human? Into a solemn future where the worst-case scenario unfolds as conventional Hollywood melodrama,\u201d Los Angeles Times critic Jack Mathews wrote at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like its protagonist, the genetically inferior would-be astronaut Vincent Freeman (Ethan Hawke), Gattaca has surpassed the circumstances of its birth. In the years since its release, Gattaca has had influence far beyond its box-office reception, and critics now rank the movie as among the best films of its kind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gattaca, the title refers to thenucleotides that make up DNA and tells the story of Vincent Freeman, who was born without the benefit of genetic engineering. His ambition is to join the crew of a space mission to one of Saturn\u2019s moons, a job for which he is banned because of his genetic inferiority. But Freeman finds a way to masquerade as a genetically superior \u201cvalid\u201d and to work for the Gattaca Aerospace Corp., where he is literally a hair away from being discovered. When a murder takes place just before the Saturn mission, Vincent must find a way to preserve his secret while uncovering the truth behind the crime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Timeout London in 2015 polled top scientists and creators of science fiction, including physicists, authors and Oscar-nominated filmmakers, as well as sci-fi film and TV stars who ranked Gattaca \u2116 32 among the 100 best science fiction films of all time:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe film succeeds so well because it\u2019s not content simply to bask in its own ideas, escalating tension when an unrelated murder investigation threatens to unmask the protagonist\u2019s existential masquerade.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many agreed with the Chicago Sun-Times\u2019 Roger Ebert,<\/a> who gave it three-and-a-half out of four stars. \u201cThis is one of the smartest and most provocative of science fiction films, a thriller with ideas,\u201d Ebert wrote in 1997, arguing that it captured a moral dilemma specific to its time:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cScience 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 \u2018Gattaca\u2019 is theoretically possible. When parents can order \u2018perfect\u2019 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\u2019s how many, I suspect, would opt to have natural children.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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, \u201cGattaca 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scientific American in 2013 cited Gattaca in a story about advances in prenatal genetic manipulation and saw it as a warning about its consequences:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Freemans are characters in the science fiction film\u00a0Gattaca, 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\u2019s imaginary universe, their real-life counterparts could be walking among us sooner than we think and, in a sense, they already are.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most important, Gattaca may have been responsible in part for preventing the very future it depicted, Slate reported in 2014:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBut in 2008, heading off a\u00a0Gattaca-esque future, Congress passed GINA, the\u00a0<\/em>Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, which makes it illegal for employers or health insurers to base their decisions on your genes. And\u00a0Gattaca, a film seen by millions, if not tens of millions, helped lay the groundwork for GINA.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paul used language strikingly similar to Wikipedia\u2019s in arguing against genetic testing, citing Gattaca as a cautionary tale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paul said the controversy was \u201cmaking a mountain out of a molehill\u201d and added that he properly credited the film\u2019s creators in describing the film\u2019s plot. (Cuccinelli lost.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Antagony & Ecstasy\u2019s Tim Brayton reappraised the film in 2016 and found that it held up despite the passage of time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s 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\u2019s best strengths; as a piece of idea-driven writing, it\u2019s directly in line with the finest speculative fiction of the mid-20th Century Golden Age, using a reasonably appealing genre plot (it\u2019s a murder mystery, at heart) as the pretext for grappling with Big Ideas about where society is, where it\u2019s going, and what that will mean for us wee tiny human beings. And so what if it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gattaca remains a touchstone for anyone concerned about eugenics, genetic discrimination and genetic testing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":259,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false},"categories":[33],"tags":[6,18,19,5],"week_theme":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/imd3.at-eikon.ch\/19-20_imd3_s6_demain_schorderet-chloe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/70"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/imd3.at-eikon.ch\/19-20_imd3_s6_demain_schorderet-chloe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/imd3.at-eikon.ch\/19-20_imd3_s6_demain_schorderet-chloe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imd3.at-eikon.ch\/19-20_imd3_s6_demain_schorderet-chloe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imd3.at-eikon.ch\/19-20_imd3_s6_demain_schorderet-chloe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imd3.at-eikon.ch\/19-20_imd3_s6_demain_schorderet-chloe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/imd3.at-eikon.ch\/19-20_imd3_s6_demain_schorderet-chloe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imd3.at-eikon.ch\/19-20_imd3_s6_demain_schorderet-chloe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imd3.at-eikon.ch\/19-20_imd3_s6_demain_schorderet-chloe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70"},{"taxonomy":"week_theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imd3.at-eikon.ch\/19-20_imd3_s6_demain_schorderet-chloe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/week_theme?post=70"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}