Gattaca

I remember seeing Gattaca around when it first came out & liking it fine.  I think it was the first sci-fi movie to really give me hope for the genre doing something serious (I hadn’t re-seen Blade Runner or Alien as an adult at that point & I generally think of The Thing as a horror movie & while I love Starship Troopers (which came out the same year) it’s more of a fun movie than a serious one).  But oddly there isn’t much I could remember about it.  I know it’s dystopian & I assumed it was Philip K Dick (it’s not) & I remembered it having interesting lighting.  The main thing I remembered though was this girl I was going out with at the time got all hot & bothered by Jude Law & got mad when I referred to him as “the gay dude” (it ends up I guess he’s not gay, just British).

Re-seeing it, wow, this is a different film than I remembered.  I didn’t remember at all that Ethan Hawke is there doing his coffee shop intellectual narration like he did in Before Sunrise.  I haven’t quite figured out how I feel about Ethan Hawke, I generally avoided anything with him back in the 1990s but the things from that era I’ve seen relatively recently (Before Sunrise & Great Expectations, even the Precinct 13 remake) seem fine.  I guess back then I saw more coffee culture intellectuals than I run into now & so I found that stuff way more annoying than I do now & that pretty much seems to be the character he always plays.  I also didn’t remember the first third of the movie before Ethan Hawke is impersonating Jude Law & why he was impersonating him in the first place.  I really forgot a ton of plot points that I am not sure if I should give away in case somebody might re-watch it that has also forgotten them.  So I guess what I’m saying is “spoilers.”  So the murder investigation… I was 100% sure that it was done by Uma Thurman because she was also an illegal impersonator & I was shocked that she wasn’t an impersonator nor the murderer.  I also feel like I wasn’t paying attention because I didn’t realize the one cop was Ethan Hawke’s brother until the reveal.  I did like that there wasn’t a happy ending romance wise (because I believe Ethan Hawke will die before the end of his trip in space) & I was surprised by Jude Law incinerating himself.  This movie is pretty solid & I don’t know why it isn’t put up as one of the top ten sci-fi movies (or at least top twenty) in a lot of lists & instead seems to be drifting towards obscurity….