What Gattaca Got Right About Genetic Discrimination, 29 Years Later

Ethan Hawke plays Vincent Freeman, a man conceived without genetic selection in a society that has made eugenics the norm. A registry classifies people as “valids” or “in-valids,” and while genetic discrimination is technically illegal, genotype profiling decides who gets professional work and who cleans offices. Vincent’s profile predicts several disorders and a lifespan of 30.2 years. He wants to go to space anyway.

Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Vincent Freeman and the Borrowed Ladder

Gattaca is Andrew Niccol’s feature directorial debut, and he wrote it too. The film runs 107 minutes. Its tagline is “There is no gene for the human spirit,” which tells you most of what the movie believes before a single scene plays.

Vincent’s parents regret conceiving him naturally. They use genetic selection for their second child, Anton Jr. The brothers grow up playing chicken in the sea, swimming out until one turns back. Vincent always loses. Then one day he beats Anton, who starts to drown, and Vincent saves him. He leaves home shortly after.

Years later Vincent cleans office spaces, including at Gattaca Aerospace Corporation. He finds a way in through what the film calls a “borrowed ladder”: donated hair, skin, blood and urine from Jerome Eugene Morrow, a former swimming star paralyzed after a car accident. Jude Law plays Jerome. With Jerome’s genetic makeup, Vincent gets hired at Gattaca and is assigned as a navigator for a mission to Titan, Saturn’s moon.

Scrubbing, Scanning, and the Heart Defect

The mechanics of the deception carry the film. Vincent must groom and scrub his body every day to remove his own genetic material. He passes daily DNA scans and urine tests using Jerome’s samples. He hides a heart defect.

Uma Thurman plays Irene Cassini. Alan Arkin plays Detective Hugo. Loren Dean plays the adult Anton Freeman. Gore Vidal appears as Director Josef, Tony Shalhoub as “German,” Ernest Borgnine as Caesar, Blair Underwood as a geneticist, Xander Berkeley as Dr. Lamar, Jayne Brook as Marie Freeman and Una Damon as Head Nurse.

Niccol’s script draws on concerns about reproductive technology and eugenics, and about what those developments might mean for a society that adopts them. It also asks whether destiny governs a life, and whether the answer sits in a person’s genes or somewhere else. Every character in Gattaca fights both the world around them and their own sense of where they belong in it.

What the Film Gets Right, and What It Doesn’t

The film’s title comes from the four nucleobases of DNA: guanine, adenine, thymine and cytosine. It was a 1997 nominee for the Academy Award for Best Art Direction and the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score. A follow-up series was in development at Showtime but has been cancelled as of 2023.

Here is the schedule the film sets for itself, and the clock it runs against.

The premise is strong and the production design earned its awards attention. The problem is that Gattaca states its thesis in the tagline and then spends 107 minutes confirming it. Vincent’s arc is never in real doubt. The registry says one thing, the man says another, and the man wins. That is a fine argument, but the film makes it early and keeps making it.

Jerome is the more interesting figure, and the film knows it. A valid who cannot use his own body, paired with an in-valid who can, is a sharper idea than anything Vincent’s ascent delivers. The borrowed ladder is the best invention here, and it is also the one the movie explores least.

Gattaca remains a useful film because its concerns about genetic selection have not gone away. As a drama, it is tidy where it should be uneasy. The world is convincing. The people inside it are not quite.

Andrew Niccol · Ethan Hawke · eugenics · Gattaca · Jude Law · sci-fi film review