Gattaca

As with so many good movies, the beginning and end are the best parts.  It opens with a bunch of weird images which are gradually revealed to be Ethan Hawke's character's fingernail shards.  Well, it's obviously not a fascinating part of the story, but it gets your attention.  The next thing shown after Ethan Hawke's morning routine is an image of work that morning, then the story goes back in time with exposition until it reaches the same morning again, except this time the audience knows what's going on.  As for the end, well, go find out yourself.  Some of the dialogue gets a little trite, but it's forgivable.  Jude Law is wonderful and Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke are, well, Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke.  The plot unfolds in the vague future when the acceptable way to have children is to genetically engineer them.  Ethan Hawke was not genetically engineered and so can't get his dream job as an astonaut-except by pretending to be Jude Law's character, Jerome Morrow, who was genetically engineered but was paralyzed in a suicide attempt.  It has all the makings of a pessimistic, dystopian movie, and yet the good part about the ending is that it becomes almost uplifting.  It makes you think about how everybody suffers in some way from discrimination, but not in a preachy way.  Oh, and about the title-it comes from the structure of DNA.  It is made up of an arrangement of four different chemical bases which are abbreviated as C, G, A, and T-the four letters which the name Gattaca is spelled from.  And for those of you who think that's cool, like me-well, that's one of those major signs that need help of some kind and possibly a better social life.

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