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Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

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Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

#241

Post by lenocinor »

I’m glad many of you enjoyed the movie. I watched it for the first time last month and did not enjoy it personally. I think the thing that kept making me not believe the narrative was the assumption that you could somehow control how your DNA was left behind. Your body leaves behind hair and skin cells and eyelashes and whatever constantly. No amount of scrubbing like he does in the movie will help that. Also the idea that we would have really advanced genetics but not better genetic detection and tracking technology was not believable for me either.

It’s a shame because I think the core idea of the movie was interesting. I just wish the implementation was more believable for me.

Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

#242

Post by heikkilevanto »

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #198
cm2187 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Particularly when the supposedly futurist technology has already become obsolete since (CRT screens, rudimentary 3d animations, lack of portable communication, absence of networks, etc). Also lots of sci-fi movies underestimate how much will not change, we live today with 200yo buildings, our cities won't look that different in 200 years.

Not until improved concrete replaces current reinforced concrete: https://theconversation.com/the-problem-with-reinforced-conc...

Well, I live in Copenhagen, in a brick building that is some 130 years old, like most of the buildings around here. Reinforced concrete has arrived, and most new buildings are built with it. I guess when the next level of super-concrete comes, we will start building with it, but old buildings will still stand for 50-100 years.

Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

#243

Post by usrusr »

UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #225
forgotpwd16 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main reason director's cut is recommended for first-time viewers is theatrical version having an intro that reveals many elements. That said the list of all the differences is quite extensive: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118929/alternateversions/ .

A general rule of thumb that I've adopted is to intentionally skip the first 10 minutes of any movie. This happened accidentally with Memento [0], it it became an incredible film. Without all that setup in the first scene, you exist with the protagonist as he discovers his world. I've tried it with other films and they give away too much information, you the viewer are practically handed the whole script. Give it a s…

I observed a similar effect with University lectures: being there from the start I often lost myself in some embarrassing state of deep distraction, but when I missed the beginning I went into attentive panic to make up for what I missed that echoed on even after I fetched up.

Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

#244

Post by anonymouskimmer »

lmm wrote: post #232
anonymouskimmer wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the major problems with eugenics highlighted in Gattaca is that it was used to artificially pre-select who was allowed to compete and who wasn't. > "Even the selection of mating partner is a form of eugenics." Only when the selection is done by those who aren't the two partners (e.g. arranged marriages, theoretically rape in the absence of abortion). Otherwise it's natural selection between partners - there's…

> there's no guarantee the aspects two people find attractive in each other are genetically heritable. Evolution naturally tends in that direction. > Assortative mating per se isn't necessarily eugenics. It takes an instruction from the outside on what mating partners should consider attractive in a potential mate. Without this instruction people will find a variety of differing, and even mutually exclusive, traits a…

> Evolution naturally tends in that direction.

A lot of what people find attractive about each other are personalities (and only some traits are heritable, not entire types), and artifacts of how people were raised or adapted to how they were raised.

> Up to a point. There's still a pretty strong correlation between what different people find attractive, and there are certainly things that almost everyone agrees are unattractive.

Of course, though moreso the latter. Eugenics, as a term, to have meaning, is an extreme of breeding behavior. It isn't just regular assortative mating among local populations.

Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

#245

Post by mejutoco »

savryn wrote: post #222
mejutoco wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are great points. To follow the argument: is a lion selfish when she kills a gazelle? To me, the story is about individual struggle. Even if his behaviour is selfish, his life is richer than if he accepted the imposed limitations by others (imagine how boring that story would be, why is that). In a way, he is following nature‘s rules (survival of the fittest), instead of the arbitrary deterministic society rule…

>nature‘s rules (survival of the fittest) no he isn't, he is merely exploiting the compassion of the society of the fittest that temporary allowed the less fit/ gifted /engineered to still live / work near them and infiltrate at the right time -- it's got a bit of that a heist/noir of criminal cat and mouse Vincent uses criminal connections to pull the entire scheme off (the german), just like a bank heist in a film…

> he is merely exploiting the compassion of the society of the fittest

If they are the fittest, how come he can actually do it? If he can "win", that is fit enough for nature, moral questions aside.

If we had a whole system saying that people with 11 toes always run faster, and a person with 10 toes wins once, that system was based on false premises, taken as objective truth without proof.

Now, if we have a system that claims people with 11 toes usually/on average run faster, why not allow the diversity of runners with 10 toes?

Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

#246

Post by deadbeeves »

goatlover wrote: post #213
wonderwonder wrote: post #172

Gattaca is one of my favorite movies, mainly because of how believable the concept is. Lets say tomorrow they create a commercially available means of ensuring a child is physically and intellectually superior. Once people start availing themselves of this service anyone with the means almost has to do it as well simply as a kindness to their unborn child to ensure they don't end up as a subspecies to the new genetic…

Problem is genetics is messy as the article states, and we have a long way to go to unentangle the role the environment plays, plus there are always unpredictable environmental factors. There’s also the possibility of negative side effects to certain genetic advantages. You might predispose your child to being a genius and mentally ill. I don’t think the movie’s caste system is realistic, because the role of genes is…

>I don’t think the movie’s caste system is realistic, because the role of genes isn’t that deterministic.

When your entire society is structured around covertly filtering out people with the wrong genes, you end up with a self-fulfilling prophecy. Natural-born people can't succeed because they've been predicted they won't succeed, and engineered people succeed because they've been predicted they will succeed. I'm not even saying this happens because someone wants it to happen like this to maintain the status quo. It can happen because your peers push you in a direction that aligns with society.

Also, if you think about it, the movie never directly states that engineered people are actually "better". Sure, they're on average taller, with perfect eyesight, and with the lowest chance of developing certain conditions, but they're not necessarily smarter or stronger; they're just as smart or as strong as they could have been given their parents. The space program was filled with "the best", but we don't actually know if it would have operated worse with a mixer personnel, that's just what the administration believed.

Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

#247

Post by mb7733 »

whatshisface wrote: post #95
mb7733 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough, but health and fitness are not just for sport and culture. It's practical; you don't want your astronauts to have medical emergencies in space. Similarly, if you put resources into training them you'd rather they didn't die at 30 due to poor genetics. If any new tech threatens to render the premise obsolete, it's robotics. Not sending humans to space in the first place avoids the issue of selecting astro…

Well, you have to be open to a little symbolism in films. "Astronaut" is a universally recognized symbol of someone who is fit and highly educated, and who had passed a lot of tests to gain access to an esteemed position.

Totally agree, the actual theme of the film is pretty timeless. I was just entertaining the "obsolescence" debate

Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

#248

Post by joshuahedlund »

lenocinor wrote: post #241

I’m glad many of you enjoyed the movie. I watched it for the first time last month and did not enjoy it personally. I think the thing that kept making me not believe the narrative was the assumption that you could somehow control how your DNA was left behind. Your body leaves behind hair and skin cells and eyelashes and whatever constantly. No amount of scrubbing like he does in the movie will help that. Also the ide…

Sci-fi has always accidentally reflected the limited imagination of the era it was written in. My favorite example is Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, written before digital displays were a thing. In the story technology has advanced so far that humans have landed on Mercury for mining, but they have to track their lost robots by manually drawing a pencil graph of their radar pings.

Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

#249

Post by naasking »

sangnoir wrote: post #197
naasking wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I'm not aware of any sci-fi that predated gender fluidity, for instance. Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1964) had gender fluidity, before it was called that. It was central to the story.

Good point! Totally forgot about that one.

Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

#250

Post by savryn »

mejutoco wrote: post #245
savryn wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>nature‘s rules (survival of the fittest) no he isn't, he is merely exploiting the compassion of the society of the fittest that temporary allowed the less fit/ gifted /engineered to still live / work near them and infiltrate at the right time -- it's got a bit of that a heist/noir of criminal cat and mouse Vincent uses criminal connections to pull the entire scheme off (the german), just like a bank heist in a film…

> he is merely exploiting the compassion of the society of the fittest If they are the fittest, how come he can actually do it? If he can "win", that is fit enough for nature, moral questions aside. If we had a whole system saying that people with 11 toes always run faster, and a person with 10 toes wins once, that system was based on false premises, taken as objective truth without proof. Now, if we have a system th…

'the fittest' could destroy him but choose not to -- since fitness in a social species is, reductively, how groups of elites structure their power games over others.

elites 'let you win' some games for all sorts of ulterior motives, implicit or unconscious even.

Vincent barely wins for a small time, he almost collapses on the treadmill lmao

My point is they left the exclusion / ruthlessness dial at level 7 when they could choose to crank it to 9

Vincent takes advantage of that temporarily, next guy and group will be punished for it.

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