And people don’t get sick, or overstress their hearts because…they…?
Just like in the real world, where discrimination on the basis of irrelevant physical characteristics like sex and race never really caught on.
There are plenty of holes one could poke in Gattaca (although IMHO it’s still a pretty good movie), but I don’t think “People would never be so prejudiced” is one of them.
Hypno-Toad is right. They have a society made of all exceptional people. All the doctors are exceptional. All the scientists are exceptional. They should be able to come up with a treatment for his problem fairly easily.
I don’t think it ruined the movie. The point that he is genetically inferior and shouldn’t be able to compete, not superhumans will save us and solve all our problems.
I haven’t seen it in a long while, but I think they showed people were kind of glitchy. They were able to select so everyone was beautiful and smart but they may be developing unknown problems.
If the heart thing bothers you just say to yourself that all the smart people are too busy working on problems to save people that matter.
It was explicitly stated that the little brother held back enough energy to swim back to shore, but the older one won by swimming past his own point-of-no-return…and then returning, while rescuing his brother, who was drowning despite having enough energy to make it back to shore, and he did it twice. I don’t know what they were trying to imply, but the logic fails as hard as the humans-as-batteries thing in The Matrix.
I see your point, but there are three BIG differences here:
(1) Society would have had to transition from our current society to the Gattaca society, and in a really big hurry. Was there some point in 2018 when suddenly a flip was switched and all the people who were alive, many of whom had grown up before all the genetic stuff was developed, suddenly totally bought into this new set of prejudices? This would be more plausible if it was set in the year 2500 or something, but it was fairly explicitly not
(2) It’s easy to think “oh, black people are all dumb” if you’re surrounded by other people who agree and if society is set up to deny black people good educations, etc. It’s much harder to think “hey, that guy whose genetics can be analyzed which demonstrated that he has a genius-level IQ, but also a potential for heart disease, is dumb”.
(3) If one owner of a factory in Jim Crow south decided he was going to hire black people, despite societal pressure against him, best case his factory is going to go OK and he’ll be able to sell widgets for a profit. That’s a vastly smaller impact than one dot-com entrepreneur in an globally connected information economy being able to hire, with near-perfect-certainty-about-their-level-of-genius, dozens of geniuses who no one else wants.
I guess a lot of my objections come from it being in a real-earth near-future setting. If we were just told “here’s an alien society in a mysterious non-specified time and place”, I’d be much more willing to buy into the culture.
The “business attire” ending never bothered me. We have no way of knowing that the hallway Vincent walks down in the movie’s final shot doesn’t lead to a changing room. 
Which brings me to the part of the movie that does bother me. When Vincent tells Uma Thurman about his upcoming space trip, he says no one knows what Titan’s surface looks like, due to its dense cloud layer. Except…even in this day and age, we DO know what Titan’s surface looks like! And even if you assume the movie takes place in an alternate timeline where the Cassini/Huygens mission failed, certainly they would have sent up other space probes? Or invented some fancy-shmancy new Earth-based telescope that can peer beyond the cloud layer? And if they don’t know what Titan looks like, WHY are they sending humans there before scouting out a proper landing site??? Yeesh!
I disagree.
Saying “I am leaving 50% energy for a return swim” doesn’t work with humans. We don’t have energy meters in our heads, not even the genetically engineered humans of the movie.
When Anton thought he couldn’t make the swim back, that was a failure of, well, “spirit” rather than actual physical failing. He “thought” he couldn’t make it, so he gave up. And he thought that partially because Vincent appeared to be better and he couldn’t believe it. He believed in his core that “valids” were better in all respects. Vincent didn’t buy into that, and believed he could do it. If his heart had actually failed, well, then they would have both died. But it didn’t.
It just shows that their own imagined “limits” weren’t where they thought they were, that’s all. They had never been tested.
Plus, the second time, Vincent was in great shape. He worked out to excess because he was afraid his heart would give out if he didn’t. Anton was a weak valid, relying on his genetic superiority to get by, and Vincent was a superior example of an “invalid”. The curves of performance overlapped.
And as for jeopardizing the mission, remember no one actually checked adult Vincent’s heart. He faked the heart rate monitors because he believed the defect would show up. Doesn’t mean it was really there. Just ask Deke Slayton about that.
Great answer.
I was baffled when Al Pacino started shouting the title.
Except if you’re going to space wearing business suits, it’s not a situation where one guy keeling over unexpectedly means everyone dies. Yes, in the early days of spaceflight when you have thousands of candidate astronauts and only need 7 guys to be your spam in a can, you can exclude people for any reason at all, even if it almost certainly would never actually impact the mission. That’s not the case in Vincent’s trip to Titan. He’s a business class passenger, not a pilot. If he keels over, he keels over.
So you’re saying that Antons heart wasn’t in it?
It’s been a long time since I saw the movie… was it made explicit that the risk he had was something where at some specific young age he might develop a heart issue, but if he didn’t, then he would be as healthy going forward? I remember having the impression that his genetic condition might develop heart issues at any moment for the rest of his life.
Well, now the weird aesthetic gets in our way of actually knowing what’s going on. Were they wearing business attire because space travel was so safe that they could wear business attire, or just because that’s what the movie’s look was?
Wasn’t it implied that this was the first ever trip of its sort? And he was going along as a navigator or something? Again, it’s been a long time since I’ve actually seen it.
I suspect that it wasn’t the intention of the film makers for you to come out of the movie thinking anything other than “Human Spirit = GOOD / Designer Babies = BAD”, but I don’t feel like I have to take the message they intended from it, if the portrayal of humans and human behavior all seems reasonable. (It’s when writers create hollow puppet characters that behave in cartoon ways that I feel like there’s no way to enjoy the movie except by agreeing with the film maker’s message.) So, in Gattaca, they have presented an interesting series of events. You can choose to side with the main character, who is clearly operating illegally and endangering many people’s lives, but who would never have been able to do much more than be a janitor, despite all forms of natural talent. He’s doing bad, because society is prejudiced against him. On the other hand, they’re prejudiced against him for scientifically provable reasons. Perhaps, at that moment, humans aren’t that much more advanced than a naturally-born person. But given time and further tinkering, humans will be kinder, less warlike, more self-motivated, more capable, etc. Choosing to have a natural child would eventually be like choosing to give birth to a homocidal maniac.
Overall, I’d say that the film makers make an argument for one position. But there’s many other arguments that one could make based on what is presented. The movie allows for it. So even though I disagree with the message of the movie, I think that it’s still a good movie.
You make a good point, but, despite what I wrote earlier, I don’t think that is THE message to get from the film.
I took it at face value - it’s a story about one man’s journey.
But, if there is a message, I would posit it’s more a tale of “beware of unintended consequences”. People thought making the best babies they could would be a good thing, and in some ways it was. But also it led to a different kind of problem. It amplified the differences between the haves and the have-nots, and gave a “scientific” identifier that could be used for segregation. I would say the film is anti-discrimination, not anti-science.
To me, the film felt like it was written by the guy who was harassed by and excluded from the In Crowd. Those who were just genetically lucky to have the looks and physique that all the girls dreamed of. Gattaca has the aroma of sour grapes to me. But I still enjoyed it. I like the concept and the story still holds up pretty well even with the issue I brought up in the OP.
Exactly. The designer people are all Barbie and Ken status-obsessed conformist snobs, like the popular kids in high school. And they all look down on their inferiors, like how the screenwriter imagines the popular kids in high school did. Except it seems to me that the popular kids in high school aren’t usually really conformist snobs who look down on everyone. In real life the jocks are way too busy with their own pursuits to spend a lot of time beating up the nerds. The ones who really pick on the nerds are usually also social outcasts for one reason or another.
That’s my biggest problem with the movie. I can see where if there’s a small minority of “superior” people that they’d spend a lot of time worrying about what the inferiors are up to, and how to keep them down, because if the normals ever banded together they’d stomp the genetic aristocrats. But in a society of mass genetic engineering, where perfect designer babies are the norm, what’s the point? What’s the point of the social conformity? I mean, I can imagine a future of crushing social conformity. And I can imagine a future of mass genetic engineering. What’s the logical connection between the two? It seems much more plausible that mass genetic engineering means a society of freaks and mutants who play by their own rules and don’t give a damn what those pencil-pushers back at headquarters think.
Or maybe “intense need for social conformity” and “always go by the book” is just slipped in along with “perfect skin” and “straight teeth” and “blue eyes” and “don’t get cancer”. Except that would be a different move, and the moral would be “don’t intentionally turn your children into natural born sheep”. And the valids wouldn’t look down on the invalids as inferior, they’d see them as dangerous and unstable and violent.
You all bring good points.
Something for me to think about the next time I watch it.
I like it that a movie can inspire so many points of view, and yet that none here are obviously “wrong”.
I kind of hate these “flaw in movie XXX” threads…
It’s a movie. The director made it to send a message.
Or not.
Maybe it’s just entertainment - an interesting story.
It’s not a documentary.
If you get to the end of the movie and then all you have to say is “Everyone knows that the Chrysler LeBaron was retired in 1995,” then I feel sorry for you.
There’s a middle ground, though.
Anachronisms can (but not always) take you out of a movie and derail the narrative. As viewers we may spend too much time wondering if the errors are plot points, or just mistakes. (this is more important in sci-fi, especially time travel movies)
It’s like Van Halen’s brown M&Ms theory - if the filmmakers can’t get simple details correct, how can we trust them with the important stuff. But as you note they aren’t the be all and end all of film analysis.
But if anyone complained about Gattaca because the Avanti was never made in an electric version, well, that’s stupid!
Except there’s a difference between watching “Death Wish 3” and complaining that Bronson’s .475 Wildey Magnum shouldn’t have been available in 1983, and complaining that Death Wish 3 glorifies vigilantism. One is complaining about details that are mistakes by someone in the prop department, and if he was carrying a near-identical but slightly different model of gun it wouldn’t have made a difference, and only fanatical collectors would know the difference. The other is complaining about the premise of the movie, which is that if bad guys do bad things you should get a gun and track them down and shoot them in the face.