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Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

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Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

#101

Post by duxup »

agumonkey wrote: post #56
duxup wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was watching an Industrial Light And Magic documentary on Disney+ and it had Spielberg talking about the transition to digital, and he goes out of his way to make the point that effects are great but if you're not presenting it right and telling a story that is worthwhile the film just won't last.

Last time I watch Terminator 2, I stopped frame by frame during the mall shooting scene, and I realized how cheap some effects were, but how editing made it subtly perfect. It just conveys the blow to represent the T1000 liquid metal visually. No need to do more. I think today's era is obese.. too much power, too available .. no constraint.. the movie gets lost in the technology.

In the ILM documentary, they talked about T2, and how they could do some amazing new effects, but they could not do a large volume of them due to the complexity. They were very careful about how they used their resources.

They had a surprisingly short amount of high end effects time in that film…but it doesn’t feel like it. Th film moves very fluidly and the effects blend from one to another without being jarring.

Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

#102

Post by dougmwne »

college_physics wrote: post #84

There is a bit of survivorship bias. Sci-fi has imagined every possible universe, some of the predictions feel very close to what is transpiring. And if we focus entirely on the human stories behind technological facades or other cultural variability, some people claim that all possible stories have been written already.

As someone who saw it when it came out, no it was clear at the time that the movie was a classic and also something we would be wrestling with for a long time to come. The genetic temptations were clear, as was thousands of years of wealth and ethnic inequality. Gattaca did a great job of portraying something yet to come.

And we are still just at the beginning of our genocratic journey.

Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

#103

Post by Barrin92 »

GuB-42 wrote: post #92
anonporridge wrote: post #8

The great thing about Gattaca is that the cinematography ages incredibly well on top of the amazing plot. A lot of great sci-fi is marred by cheap effects that look incredibly dated only a decade later. Gattaca chose to focus on the story and create a minimalist future environment that still looks beautiful 25 years later.

Generally, movies that focus on set design age much better than movies that focus on effects. If you make a good set, it will look good no matter how technically advanced your setup is. It may look better when filmed using the latest cameras, but it will never look wrong when it isn't, because it is the real thing. Effects are not the real thing, and as technology improved people have gotten better at noticing and ar…

it's why I think the Farscape puppets were absolutely genius. They look so timeless compared to a lot of the heavy CGI use during that era of TV sci-fi.

Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

#104

Post by reducesuffering »

akira2501 wrote: post #55
apples_oranges wrote: post #18

I believe advances in AI will make the core plot idea of the film obsolete. It is a good movie, but even the most genetically perfect human will probably not have a fraction of the intelligence of AI. He will be, relatively speaking, a mere dummy like the rest of us. Thus the future as shown in this film will not happen. However, good sci-fi is actually always about the present. And the movie has a lot of interesting…

> perfect human will probably not have a fraction of the intelligence of AI. Yes.. but he will still be operational even when the electricity is interrupted, which will make him look light years ahead of the AI. The "AI" will always have this problem. Until it gets a body and an internal power source it won't match our capabilities, and even then, most likely.. it will start to share some of our vulnerabilities and c…

An AGI will very quickly understand how to create a body and self-sustaining solar or nuclear energy source for itself, far more independent than our needs of water, food, oxygen, and warmth.

Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

#105

Post by jart »

apples_oranges wrote: post #18

I believe advances in AI will make the core plot idea of the film obsolete. It is a good movie, but even the most genetically perfect human will probably not have a fraction of the intelligence of AI. He will be, relatively speaking, a mere dummy like the rest of us. Thus the future as shown in this film will not happen. However, good sci-fi is actually always about the present. And the movie has a lot of interesting…

The elite in Gattaca weren't genetically perfect (i.e. the upper echelon of a race born by natural chance), they were genetically engineered. There's a big difference here. Humans are biological computers. There's no reason we can't be made like computers too, with features added that give us the same advantages as silicon machines. In fact it's more likely that silicon machines will become more like us, due to the density, three-dimensionality, power efficiency, and antifragility of our wetware, which is the product of eight billion years of natural selection rather than a century of industrialization. So I think Gattaca is entirely plausible, although it wouldn't surprise me if the oppression ends up happening in the complete opposite direction, where the genetically engineered superior creatures aren't granted human status and instead used as a slave caste by the faith births who wield their unfairly inherited wealth and power.

Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

#106

Post by [deleted] »

hagy wrote: post #96
fallingknife wrote: post #33

I guess I never thought it was much more than a good movie. I mean what is the message supposed to be? For one thing the main character has a heart condition and absolutely should be weeded out of the space mission he is trying to get on. As a larger point about a dystopian future with discrimination based on genetic characteristics I don't think it works either. We discriminate like that based on genetics now. It's…

Exactly! We are all already the beneficiaries and casualties of the unearned rewards and punishments due to the randomized genetic combination we received at conception. Kathryn Paige Harden brilliantly explains this ethical challenge in her book, “The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality”, https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691190808/th... > In recent years, scientists like Kathryn Paige…

[deleted]

Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

#107

Post by InspiredIdiot »

fallingknife wrote: post #74
acover wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Misread

Then it's not good writing, because it isn't a statistical probability in the movie. We actually see that he has a heart condition.

There is a certain probability he will have the heart condition. That actually happened. There is a separate, dependent probability that given he has the heart condition he will die very young. That, at the point of the movie, hasn't yet come to pass. I don't see the problem.

Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

#108

Post by senthilnayagam »

at current levels space travels is risky, high cost and prestige. except for couple of private space tourists in last couple of years, everyone else was chosen by governments, predominantly fighter pilots.

billionaires will be going to space more often than commoners in this and possibly next decade.

I liked Gattaca but believe more in The Expanse kind of future colonisation of solar system.

Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

#109

Post by polio »

fallingknife wrote: post #74
acover wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Misread

Then it's not good writing, because it isn't a statistical probability in the movie. We actually see that he has a heart condition.

The movie is suggesting that the criteria for the mission and the fatalistic attitudes of society are somewhat incomplete by showing that Vincent's 99th percentile "grit" has been completely overlooked because of the genetic stuff which is more readily measured.

Perhaps it's true that his genetic predisposition, as measured, is 70th percentile, but there are other relevant factors towards being a good astronaut that aren't so easily measured, to say nothing of environmental factors affecting cardiac health as well as the reliability of the gene-based measurement itself.

Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

#110

Post by cstuder »

js2 wrote: post #20
anonporridge wrote: post #8

The great thing about Gattaca is that the cinematography ages incredibly well on top of the amazing plot. A lot of great sci-fi is marred by cheap effects that look incredibly dated only a decade later. Gattaca chose to focus on the story and create a minimalist future environment that still looks beautiful 25 years later.

Despite Gattaca being one of my favorite movies for years I only recently learned, right here on HN, that the cinematographer is Sławomir Idziak, frequent collaborator of Krzysztof Kieślowski, which explains why Gattaca looks so much like one of my other favorites, The Double Life of Veronique . > create a minimalist future environment that still looks beautiful 25 years later. See also: Dark City

And for the love of god, watch the directors cut of `Dark City`, not the cinema version.
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