Gattaca was so ahead of its time, reminds me I should re-watch it again.
Definitely on my re-watch list, together with Idiocracy.
I don't really get the love for Idiocracy. You know the amusement ride with the really obviously bad history? The whole movie is basically that. They know their audience doesn't know much history so they need to make mistakes dumb enough so everyone will get it.
It's a cynical movie that knows its audience isn't so smart, so they need to make sure the idiots watching know who the real idiots are. That way the audience can enjoy watching a lot of really dumb stuff while feeling above it instead of targeted.
Good movie, but according to these plots, it was better to be handicapped in 1023 than it is 2023. Let's say genetic engineering assisted human evolution became a reality and enhanced humans pretty much dominated exciting things like space exploration. To be more ethical, participation could be selected by neutral merit tests, but in practice enhancement would still end up as a dominating factor. So what? I would still rather go on vacation to Mars on a spaceship built by enhanced folks than not go at all. Just like I am not realistically smart enough to make a new vaccine in a year, but I still enjoy not dying of the diseases. If genetic engineering is available to all parents and has no adverse side effects, why treat it differently from prenatal vitamins or hiring tutors in school? Some people will choose to go without genetic engineering, or vitamins, or vaccines and that's fine - they can find their own unique role in society and we all benefit of having a control group for our various experiments. Tons of valuable science only exists because of Amish, and the later seem to be perfectly happy to live their own way, and if someone are unhappy we don't stop them from leaving.
> We explicitly discriminate by intelligence, which is mostly genetic. How is that different than Gattaca? We discriminate on intelligence when it's important for the job at hand . The bad kind of discrimination is the kind that considers irrelevant factors. I agree implicit discrimination based on height and attractiveness exists in our culture. This movie is a searing criticism of exactly that kind of discriminatio…
We do our college admissions by SAT score. If we did them by genetic test for intelligence (Gattaca style), the classes would be mostly the same minus some dumb rich kids. And since social class and income is heavily determined by where you go to school, it's a similar situation to Gattaca. In the movie, if the genetic enhancements work, then it's basically meritocracy, and not that different than what we have today.…
In the movie class mobility is impossible. Not improvable, not very difficult, but predetermined at birth.
In reality it can be impossible for some people, but there are many examples of people accomplishing this, some with lots of effort.
I believe the absolute determinism of that society is what makes it a nightmare. Saying that it is the same as reality is, IMO, an exaggeration.
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…
>Harden shows why our refusal to recognize the power of DNA perpetuates the myth of meritocracy [...]
There's an on-going philosophical discussion about meritocracy. The debate on i2c[^2] is fascinating. I've read both books, but I was leaning towards Sandel from the get-go anyway.
However reading about this topic on the DNA /generic side is equally interesting. Thanks for the link to the book :-)
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.
I have never watched the directors cut of any movie. This will be my first.
this line lives so deep in my brain: "You want to know how I did it? I never saved anything for the swim back"
I never understood that. I don't think the movie is clear exactly what happens, but he... does swim back, right? Or does he just flounder and rely on his brother bringing him back?
Also, he quite likely _does_ die in space. Which figuratively but very directly represents not leaving anything for the swim back. There is room to square the main message of the movie about transcending limits with Gore Vidal's line (something like) "No one exceeds his potential... It would simply mean we had failed to accurately assess it in the first place." Maybe he makes it back, maybe he doesn't, but he goes, does what he sets out to do with no consideration of whether he will be able to return and then tries to return. It's exactly equivalent to people who say they would go to Mars even without knowing whether it is a one-way trip at the outset.
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.
Farscape is criminally under rated/known!
It’s also amusing that SG1 ended up with two of the leads from it too for a bit.
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.
I doubt that very much. People can always be wilder than fiction. I'm not aware of any sci-fi that predated gender fluidity, for instance.
Greg Egan's _Diaspora_ (1997) and _Oceanic_ (1998) come to my mind. Of course not really predating, with what we now recognize as gender fluidity existing for thousands of years, but in any case early texts long before the notion rose to be widely known in our culture.