I feel obliged to point out that it is impossible for the movie in the OP, The Life of David Gale, to be entirely stupid. It does, after all, include Laura Linney.
There were changes made from the short story to the movie which made it a lot stupider. For instance, in the movie, it’s clearly stated that there are only 3 pre-cogs in the entire world, and the entire existence of pre-crime is dependent solely on those 3 pre-cogs. :smack: Um, you are basing this entire setup on THREE PEOPLE?!?! What happens when they grow old and die? If they go crazy? What happens to the entire pre-crime facility then? Eh? :dubious: And how did they get this set up in the first place? Any large city would have more than enough crime to keep 3 people in visions and hallucinations 24/7.
In the story, which was a lot different, it was clear that there were a lot more than 3 pre-cogs. I’d have to go back and re-read it, but I seem to remember pre-cogs in multiple cities all over the country, dozens at the very least.
The plot was also much different, but I’d have to go back and watch the movie and re-read the story to get more into the details. But yeah, the movie took itself way to seriously, and falls apart on closer examination. If they’d stuck to the original story, it would hold up a lot better, although it might not have made as dramatic of a movie.
I could be wrong but it was my understanding they were just starting to implement the pre-crime program and Washington D.C. was the first city. I think the idea was that other cities would see how effective the pre-crime program was in D.C. before putting their own in. If D.C.'s was successful other cities would start their own programs and other pre-cogs would be bred and/or developed for them.
Except that Rudy getting out onto the football field is a legitimate moment of triumph for him, and isn’t going to kill anyone.
As far as I can tell, Gattaca presents Jude’s character as a hero, and his successful getting-into-space as a triumph. when in fact he’s totally selfish and it’s a potential disaster.
C’mon guys. The Room absolutely has to be the winner.
Minority Report had some really dumb parts.
Like, here we are in the future, and thanks to pre-crime we haven’t had a murder in years. We can stop premeditated murders before they happen, so no premeditation is possible, and if we act fast we can rappel in and stop crimes of passion before they can be carried out.
And so, what happens to people who try to carry out crimes of passion? No trial, no evidence, no rehabilitation. You just grab them and stick them in a freezer.
But what’s the point? Why do you need to harshly punish attempted murder? Why not put them in a sanitarium? Maybe they need to be segregated from society because they’re unstable enough to commit voluntary manslaughter, but we don’t punish voluntary manslaughter with death or life imprisonment today, so why do we do it in the future?
If you don’t have certain punishment, then harsh punishment makes sense as a deterrent. But if you have certain punishment, then you don’t need to be harsh. And after all, everyone who commits a crime of passion by definition disregards the likely consequences of being caught and frozen, much less the probable consequences of being stopped before they can carry out the impulsive murder.
The only reason for the freezing without trial is so that Tom Cruise has no recourse when framed for murder. There won’t be a trial, there won’t be a psych evaluation, he won’t be able to explain himself, he’ll just be grabbed and frozen. And so therefore he has to go rogue, so we can have the second act of the movie. It’s just dumb.
Also, Good Will Hunting. Damn, what a stupid movie.
Wow, that was painful. Can’t tell what’s worse, the writing or the acting. Yeeaaagghhh.
No offense, but if you cannot even remember the lead in the movie, maybe your recollection is not fully informed?
Gattaca presents Ethan Hawke not as a hero, but as representative of “god babies” (a clever term considering his competition is genetically designed) and the permanent underclass of a future where eugenics is commonplace. It is from the moment that his brother was born where we see the point of view of the underclass, where “valids” are seen as perfect and better in every way compared to the natural born.
Hawke’s character is emblematic of the triumph of the human spirit, where there is something innate in all of us that enables us to trump “perfection” and succeed when all odds are stacked against us. Space travel is chosen because Gattaca is the most elite upper echelon of society, thereby making it the most difficult task to conquer. We see Hawke gazing longingly at every shuttle launch, again reminding the viewer of the caste system and showing how impossible it is for certain members of society to ever rise up. Harping on whether it is selfish that his heart might fail him in space misses the entire point of the movie.
Obviously we can disagree, but Gattaca is very intelligent and will some day be mentioned in the great sci-fi canon.
Didn’t Demi Moore and Michael Douglass specialize in these kind of movies in the 90s?
AI:Artificial Intelligence. Why would you build an immortal artificial child that will love you obsessively, even long after you are dead? And why design it so that the obsession can’t be turned off?
The part I hate about Gattaca is the idea that genetic engineering will produce a conformist risk-averse bland yuppie culture.
Except why would it? Everyone will be the same? No they won’t. In the movie we even see one example of why it wouldn’t, the guy with six fingers who’s an expert musician.
The resulting society should be the exact opposite of conformist. Why would there be an overwhelming social need to conform when genetic engineering results in more diversity, rather than less? Why does this produce a society where everyone is desperately trying to fit in, and desperately trying to keep out those that don’t fit?
Smart, healthy, fit and attractive people aren’t boring. You know what’s boring? Sickness. Mental disability. Disfigurement. Lethargy. Suffering. Ethan Hawke’s heart defect doesn’t make him a better person. I have a friend who’s going back for another round of chemotherapy, after being cancer-free for a few years. His cancer hasn’t made him a better person. I have another friend who just died from cancer. His cancer didn’t make him a better person, because it killed him.
Gattaca doesn’t work for me, because the society presented is irrational. Of course, irrational prejudices exist. Except, why not make a movie about one of those real irrational prejudices? Ethan Hawke is a black man passing for white. Except, a black man with a congenital heart defect might experience irrational prejudice, and therefore choose to pass for white, but being excluded from the astronaut program because of the heart defect isn’t irrational.
Same with Rudy being excluded from the Notre Dame varsity football team. He was excluded from the football team for perfectly rational reasons, namely that he was small and slow and weak.
And so the message of Gattaca is muddled. What is the message? That it’s wrong to be irrationally prejudiced against Ethan Hawke? To me, that’s a yawner of a message.
But dude - it’s Sidney Poitier, doctor, humanitarian and saint.
Plus, it’s Sidney fucking Poitier! Nobody would care if your son brought him home! Hell, I’d marry him, as long as he agreed to raise the kids Lutheran.
They swung so far over to the other side that it is more than a bit jarring. Not to say comedic.
Regards,
Shodan
What about Boomerang, where Eddie Murphy is supposed to learn how to love a woman for her character instead of her looks and they cast as the ‘character’ woman Halle Berry! Is wasn’t like it was that easy to find a woman better looking than Robin Givens. They had to work at it.
No kidding. This movies takes itself so seriously, and while Tommy Wiseau claims he’s in on the joke, he clearly doesn’t understand why everybody is laughing at his probably very real pain. His 2nd masterpiece is The House that Drips Blood on Alex, a 19-minute short film that seems like he’s trying to be self-aware and make an actual funny movie. Except, he doesn’t understand why The Room is so hilarious. So The House… fails on every level as well, and ironically enough, then becomes as funny and painful as The Room.
“I didn’t do it! I never hit her!”
It’s been a while since I saw Gattaca, so I apologize if I misremember some things.
I think most people are assuming that Gattaca takes place in the time-period “Twenty Minutes in the Future”. It’s a very good assumption given that most of society seems to have not changed despite the advances in genetic technology that allow us to determine everyone’s genetic disposition, but not necessarily accurate. I’m not positive, but I’m fairly sure there’s nothing in the movie that could concretely place it in any particular time period except that they happen to have many of the same social constructs we do, with one additional one. Is there even any evidence that it’s meant to take place in the same reality as ours? All we are given is some society that has created a system whereby those created without genetic engineering are not given consideration for much of anything specifically because they might have genetic flaws. It need not be the United States in any way shape or form that we’re used to. It’s some science-fiction society that works in completely different ways than our own, and it is inaccurate to project onto it aspects of our society.
It’s not clear to me that Ethan Hawke’s character even has a heart defect; all that is known is that he is genetically predisposed to one. The swimming contest shows that even if he is potentially physically inferior, he may best his genetic superiors in some physical efforts perhaps due to how he physically trained himself. He won’t have the perfect heart that Jude Law’s character has, but there’s no evidence that he actually would be a liability. I don’t know what to take from the treadmill scene other than it causing mounting stress that he might be discovered; I don’t see his accelerated heartbeat meaning anything other than its perfectly normal acceleration under strenuous exercise. Perhaps that acceleration would not be normal for someone with the absolutely perfect heart he’s supposed to have, but it didn’t to me suggest that he necessarily has a problem.
The movie still has a few assumptions that seem highly unlikely and a few scenes that are wildly implausible, and probably takes itself a bit too seriously, but I don’t see it as “incredibly stupid”. Yes, it might be a heavy-handed metaphor for race relations, but it’s also something of the triumph of human willpower over society’s artificially imposed barriers.
I can get past that. I can’t get past his eyeball working the second time.
It’s hard for me to believe security is so bad they didn’t remove his retinal scan from the VIP list once they become convinced he’s an untrustworthy felon – but, okay, people make mistakes, fine, whatever; just don’t let it happen again, right? And then it happens again, because, well, they still haven’t taken him off the list.
And – no. That’s like getting back up, bleeding but not yet dead, to menacingly brandish your sword at twenty paces while making absolutely sure that Indy’s still watching with his revolver at the ready.
I used to feel the same way until I saw this.
Clearly true. (Note that in post 23 I was clearly uncertain of which actor was which, but no one corrected me, so I assumed I was right.)
Well, I certainly walked out of the theater with the overall impression that:
-Ethan Hawke was the hero
and
-his making his way onto the shuttle was a triumph that we were supposed to be cheering for. Yay! Happy ending!
My negative reactions are based on that general understanding of the movie.
You seem to be claiming that that is NOT the case. Which I can’t really argue with, having seen the movie once when it was released however many years ago… except that I strongly suspect that most people walk out of the theater with the same reaction I had.
I’m curious if anyone else in this thread agrees with you.
Somewhat relevant is the real life case of Deke Slayton, one of the original 7 Mercury astronauts who, shortly before his chance to go into space, was found to have a heart murmur. What did he do? He accepted the diagnosis kept working for the good of the program.
What’s a greater triumph of the human spirit, what makes you more proud to be part of this race… the story of Deke Slayton or of Ethan-Hawke-in-Gattaca?
Granted, this is a pointless objection if Gattaca is NOT trying to say “look what amazing things humans can accomplish, Ethan Hawke’s character is so admirable and strong and awesome”…
We don’t ever see the culture. All we ever see are the employees from one company, plus a couple cops. The cops didn’t seem like conformist risk-averse yuppies, nor did the non-Gattaca people we catch occasional glimpses of, though IIRC most of them were in-valids.
The second part is your own personal interpretation, which you think is stupid. Just because someone is an example of the amazing things humans can accomplish does NOT automatically make him admirable and strong and awesome. Frankly, the opposite is usually true: they are probably irrationally driven or ruthless or just so focused that they have no chance at a healthy, well-adjusted life.
I wouldn’t want my son to be like Vincent or Rudy.
I’m pretty sure we’re not supposed to be having the “Yay! Happy Ending!” reaction. The swimming contest pretty clearly paints Vincent as a psycho, not to mention all the sick shit he went through to become Jude Law’s character. Extending his legs? Yowza.