Fly Me to the Moon (of Saturn)

Andrew Niccol is a director who always seems to make cold, tight, almost airless films. He has a certain calculating storytelling to his movies, and when he’s operating in what seems to be his comfort zone – the future, where some kind of cold, faceless tech has reduced all of humanity to a single number, a string of letters, or something similar – it feels like he’s riffing on all the things that could and have gone wrong with the modern world. You can see this in his works like In Time, Anon, and before all that, Gattaca.

In some ways his films do work. Each bit of tech that he lets his film become obsessed with – genetics in Gattaca, time keeping as currency in In Time, big brother tech watching everyone in Anon – is spun out to its logical conclusions, letting this bit of tech become not just something the people of the world have to deal with, but the whole of their life and everything they deal with. It can also be boiled down to a simple idea, which is both a strength and a weakness. For In Time, the whole concept is “what if time really were money?” In fairness to that film, the idea has some intriguing merits to it that can make for a propulsive story. But at the same time, Niccol’s style, which is sometimes too cerebral for the actual film he’s making, can betray the energy the film is attempting to build to.

Gattaca is Niccol’s first film as a director, released in 1997, and it shows many of his strengths and weaknesses on full display. It doesn’t have the warmth or emotionality of his follow up film, The Truman Show (another movie with an easy to boil down premise: “what if you really were just a character on a TV show?”), instead highlighting Niccol’s desire for tight, cold, airless productions. It’s not a bad film, per se, and it won a few awards (while being nominated for even more), but it lacks the emotional gut punch that a story like this could really use. It’s the perfect distillation of Niccol’s directing style, right at the start of his career.

Vincent Freeman (played as a child by Mason Gamble) was a naturally born kid, brought into a our world in a future where every child is normally grown in a lab, screened and tested and modified so their genetics are tip top. Vincent didn't have that, and was viewed as being at a disadvantage for his whole life, from the time he was born until he was a teen (played Chad Christ), and through to when he was an adult (played by Ethan Hawke). He didn’t have the advantages his younger, engineered brother, Anton (played as a child by Vincent Nielson, as a teenager by William Lee Scott, and as an adult by Loren Dean), had. That, though, only inspired Vincent to work even harder.

His dream was to go into space, from the space facility Gattaca, but that facility wouldn’t employ him. Due to his genetics he was viewed as a risk, too much trouble to employ and too likely to die before he ever made it to space. He ended up working as a janitor at Gattaca, destined to be stuck there forever with no chance for the stars. That was until he met German (Tony Shalhoub), a fixer who could get Vincent everything he wanted. He had a client, Jerome Eugene Morrow (Jude Law), who had been injured in a motor vehicle accident and was paralyzed from the waist down. If Vincent paid the German a certain portion of his salary, and helped keep Morrow in the life he was accustomed to, Morrow would let Vincent “borrow” his genetics. Vincent would become Morrow, and he’d finally get to the stars… so long as he wasn’t caught first.

Developed at a time when the fears of human cloning and genetic development were widespread (Dolly the Sheep had been created just a year earlier, in 1996, and suddenly every government was worried that human clones were just around the corner), the concept behind Gattaca does make sense. If you could boil all the potential for a person down to a simple blood test, you’d be able to predict who they could be and what value they could have to society. It seems honorable enough, being able to screen people for conditions they might have later in life, but in a society where these tests could be used to grade everything about a person from the day they were born, it also becomes oppressive and scary.

This is an aspect of the film that Gattaca handles very well. There are times where the film builds paranoia and dread perfectly, getting you worked up in the film as if you were watching a Hitchcockian thriller. This is the movie at its best, and it perfect exemplifies Niccol’s writing and directing ethos: find a simple idea, one that almost seems noble, and then spin it out to the point where it creates a dystopia that our lead character is unable to escape from no matter how many breaks he might get.

At the same time, however, the film lacks emotion and soul. As good as Niccol is at coming up with these dystopian settings (as warm and welcoming as The Truman Show seems, even it is dystopian when you really think about it) he’s not always so great at actually finding the weight and character needed to bring these films to life. Gattaca, for all its intriguing ideas, never really connects properly to the people living in the world of the film. We see the fear and dread when the chase is on to catch Vincent (all because someone died at the space facility and now the cops think he, the real him, is the prime suspect all because of a stray eyelash he dropped) but we never feel the connections between the characters.

Vincent (as Morrow) falls for a woman, Irene Cassini (Uma Thurman), and this becomes a romance that is supposed to make him think about if he wants to go into space, to spend a year apart from her, to risk everything to be with her. And that would be a good storyline, if the film ever invested in it. But it doesn’t, instead treating the characters at something of a remove. The two meet, they date, they spend time together, and then fall into bed together, but there’s never any chemistry between them (even though Hawke and Thurman fell in love on set and were married after). Niccol is great at setting these characters in their world, but he doesn’t seem to understand how to make them live in it.

It’s weird, too, because Niccol can get great performances out of people, such as in The Truman Show, but very often he seems to feel more comfortable having his players in these dystopian worlds acting apart, reserved, removed from each other. It’s like his vision requires that people living in a dystopia stop actually being people, moving around more like robots in human skin. It happens again and again in many of these films from the director, with the one key time it doesn’t being The Truman Show, but that might only be because Truman doesn’t realize he’s on a show and the world is built to keep him safe and content. Emotions have to be artificially applied there, whereas in Gattaca (as with so many of his other films) they can be removed to focus more on the core concept at play.

I like the ideas at play in Gattaca and I don’t think it’s a poorly put together film, but there is an emotional weight that is missing that holds it back from being truly great. I’ve seen the film twice now, once when it came out back in the late 1990s and again now for this review, and it still hasn’t clicked with me. It’s too cold, too sterile, too emotionless to truly sell all aspects of its story, and that betrays some of the themes that Niccol really wants to illustrate. I kept wishing that as the walls closed in and Hawke’s Vincent was put under more and more pressure, that he’d bring out deeper emotions in the people around him, as if just by existing in their cold world he could bring life and color to it (almost as if he were in Pleasantville). Sadly that doesn’t happen, and Gattaca ends up missing the soul that could have truly brought it all together.