Gattaca

In his new sci-fi drama, writer/director Andrew Niccol creates a "not so distant future" where genetic engineering reigns supreme -- at the expense of human diversity. In a world where petri-dish babies are manufactured for perfection, less-fortunate "god children" -- those conceived without the benefit of scientific intervention -- are automatically destined for failure. People born naturally suffer a new kind of discrimination: genoism.

Enter Vincent (Ethan Hawke), a perfect specimen of a man: intelligent, healthy, athletic, good-looking, ambitious, well-adjusted, and well-endowed. He's a "faith child," however, so to achieve his lifelong dream of space travel at the Gattaca Corporation, he has to buy and assume the identity of a genetic "superior" -- a chainsmoking alcoholic who has been paralyzed and is now willing to sell his DNA on the black market. But when Gattaca's mission director is murdered a week before Vincent, now an elite navigator, is scheduled for take-off, police threaten to brand him a killer.

Unfortunately, despite all the advances of modern science, predictable one-liners and full-circle scenes of corny machismo haven't been fully weeded out of Hollywood's gene pool. At least Gattaca has some positive traits: an aesthetic vision of the future that's stunningly realized through Frank Lloyd Wright architecture and 1940s-inspired costumes; a genuinely suspenseful plot that relies more on complex ethical ideas than on big chase scenes; and a character (the gene sellout played by Jude Law) whose charm, wit, and tragic status steal the show from the seemingly superfluous Uma Thurman and even the talented Hawke.

-- Lorelei Sharkey