Watched “Gattaca” a week or two ago. I like the film but I thought of something that I can’t let go. At the beginning of the film, the parents are told that the kid has a 99% chance of being dead by 30 due to a congenital heart condition. And throughout the film, he’s walking around with a death sentence hanging around his neck. But later I remember, “Wait, what about medical science? Surely, there are drugs, surgery, or other procedures that can alleviate or even cure his condition.”
So did society decide it was better to just concentrate on predicting who would stay healthy and let all the others die off? Or did the writer just hope no one would think about it?
Since all children are genetically re-structured to have no genetic flaws, there would be no reason to pursue those lines of science to treat genetic abnormalities. Since it is illegal to have natural children, anyone with genetic abnormalities has no access to healthcare anyway.
What I want to know is, he’s heading out on a multi-year mission in space as Watson finishes storing up a 10-year supply of blood, skin & hair. I think the jig will be up sometime before he gets back from his mission… “What do you mean, you need glasses?”
It’s been a few years since I’ve seen it, but I didn’t get the impression that it was illegal to have kids the old-fashioned way. It just wasn’t common.
IIRC, there was nothing illegal about any of the old ways - you could have natural children, hire people because you liked their teeth or tits, and have any kind of medical treatment you wanted. It was even technically illegal to discriminate on genetic grounds. None of which had anything to do with reality… which was all the brilliant part of the film, IMHO.
The whole premise of the movie was weird. The constant genetic examinations didn’t ring true to me - generally speaking, with privileged groups, once your in, you’re in. They aren’t constantly testing you. That’s part of the privilege.
I could see constant ID checks like the retina scans in “Minority Report.” But those were unobtrusive and really just for access purposes (except for the one as he’s leaving a Metro-train car. That one sticks out to me as a Police State kind of thing). But yeah, subjecting everyone to a genetic test all the time is weird. Once they’ve determined that you’re “good” they really only need to establish ID after that and only for access purposes. It’s paranoid to check everyone’s qualifications every single time they show up for work. Or right before they enter the rocket for a mission to Titan. Also, I like how one can just show up for work, board the rocket, and immediately blast off for Titan, in a business suit.
People always complain about the business suit thing, and the movie should have probably omitted that, but it’s really not that bad. In their future, space travel is as safe as airline flights, at least as far as life support is concerned (I can imagine you can still make a mistake in the navigation and never come back, but at least you’ll be comfortable until you die…). What’s the difference between a business suit and a blue jumpsuit, really?
And it really doesn’t matter if they discover his secret when he returns. He did what he wanted, he proved he was as good as them. Plus, his actions might actually change society.
He’s not expecting to come back. He’s expecting to die of his congenital heart defect before the mission is over. This is how he beat his brother in the swimming competition, even though his brother was a better swimmer. His brother saved enough strength to swim out and back, he used all his strength to swim out and didn’t care if he made it back.
Yes, and the business suit thing is fine. If there’s a life support failure, you die, whether you’re wearing a business suit or a blue jumpsuit. Back in the early days of aviation you had to wear a leather jacket, goggles, scarf, helmet, thick gloves, and insulated boots. Nowadays you can take a Southwest flight wearing flip flops, tank top, and shorts and carry your luggage in a paper sack. So in Gattaca space flight is routine enough that dressing in special clothes is not necessary. And since everyone in this future world of the future is a conformist, they wear what everyone else is wearing, which is conservative business dress.
Of course, I disagree about the part where genetic engineering makes everyone the same. No it doesn’t, it makes everyone custom built. We saw the piano player with six fingers. He was deliberately created as a freak. Now why aren’t more people like that, instead of Ken and Barbie? I don’t buy the crushing conformity premise.
I do think the six fingered piano player didn’t fit with the rest of the movie. Everyone else seems about perfection, and here is this celebrated “freak”. If you could genetically engineer such things, why aren’t Olympic athletes (such as the real Jerome) enhanced? I just ignore that bit of plot.
What I do like is that the movie shows subtly that the supposed genetic superiors aren’t all that. The murder was committed by the department head, Vincent overcomes his supposed inferiority, and fooled almost everyone, and the non-engineered cop (Alan Arkin) solves the case before the “valid” cop does.
And I think Vincent doesn’t have a bad heart. His medical says only he has a “high probability” of it. He may be worrying about something that might never happen. I don’t think he’d willingly risk the other crewmembers’ lives if he was sure his heart would give out.
Dunno, if you work for the NSA, odds are likely that you’re a talented mathematician/programmer/something who is guaranteed a good job for life. But, that doesn’t mean that security at NSA headquarters is a once-in-a-lifetime thing that you have to go through.
The guy in Gattaca appears to be something like a slightly-more-advanced version of an airline pilot. Airline pilots are probably regularly tested for drugs, they have to go through security scanners regularly, etc. It’s not to ensure that they’re still “people of privilege”, it’s to install safeguards in a business that has the potential to kill hundreds of people if something goes wrong. In the case of Gattaca, it’s just happenstance that those tests would also catch him out on his lie.
The “superior” brother that started drowning the instant he got to 50% stamina, but could be rescued by the “inferior” one who was already below that.
The main suspect in the murder being decided by a single eyelash found 50 yards from the location the body was found, which was not the murder scene, when it was known that he had previously been employed in the building…
Your second point kinda goes along with my point earlier - that the “superior” really aren’t necessarily so. It’s just what they tell each other to justify how they treat the “invalids”.
The third is sloppy police work, but remember the “invalid” Alan Arkin was doing a proper investigation. It was his partner, the valid, that was going down the wrong path.
The first - yeah, that’s stupid! For a few more seconds of film, they could have shown him setting a timer or something!
Security tests may be repeated, but barring promotions and such, background check aren’t. The NSA doesn’t question you once per week to make sure you went to college. Genetic testing, as portrayed in the movie, is a background check - unlike a drug test, its results are immutable.
Right. They don’t do the DNA tests over and over to make sure you’re still valid after 10 years. They do the DNA tests the same way you swipe your badge to enter your building and type your password to access your computer. The DNA test confirms your identity, same as an ID card or a password.
The thing that really bugs me about the movie (which I’ve ranted about before) is that its message is bullshit… or at least the specific way it’s shoved down our throats out in the movie is bullshit.
It’s clearly the case, to anyone with an ounce of sense, that it is idiotic to not hire someone who is great at math to do math for your corporation just because he has some unrelated genetic defect. If the Gattaca society actually existed some company would be the one that was willing to hire all the brilliant people who were not genetically ideal, pay them much lower salaries than all the other companies (because of lack of competition), and destroy its competition. And that would be the end of the Gattaca society.
However, one of the few situations in which a genetic defect really SHOULD prevent someone from following their dream is that you do NOT risk the lives of a bunch of astronauts by sending someone who could die at any moment due to a potentially faulty heart out into space. One of the Mercury astronauts ended up never going into space because a medical exam before his flight turned up some minor and quite-possibly-never-relevant-at-all issue with his heart, but they didn’t let him go into space because of the risk to the mission. They shouldn’t have sent him out into space just because of the strength of the human spirit or some such BS.
I always got the impression that the point was that it was supposed to be a practice vs theory kind of thing. The GM people had more stamina on paper than the naturals, but lacked real fortitude. The naturals really had character and resolve the GMs couldn’t match, and when the shit hit the fan in practice, the naturals came out on top.