GATTACA |
| 1 THE RANT It has been a month since a review was last posted. This is not because our reviewers have all been ill, avoiding the Lizard or abducted by Aliens. No this sad state of affairs came about because there was just nothing we wanted to go and see. A whole month in which the local cinemas showed wall-to-wall crap of interest to no one with half a mind. Even if you had just a quarter of a mind you would have been hard pressed to find anything worth watching. Actually it isn’t quite true that there was nothing worth seeing. For instance, I would have quite liked to see either FairyTale, A True Story or The Ice Storm. Unfortunately my local cinemas would only permit me to see these if I was prepared to go at three o’clock in the afternoon, not on Saturday and Sunday or whilst wearing a fluorescent cabbage and making the booking in Danish. Unfortunately I wanted to see them at a civilized time on a weekend evening. I was also excited to see that Jackie Brown is released this weekend and eagerly phoned the speaking cinema to find out what time I could go and see it but there was nary a mention. Further intelligence work revealed that I was not to be allowed to see it until April 10th. Bugger. So there you have it. In Derby alone you have 20 screens of crap. If you have more than one eighth of a brain you are not catered for and anyway 12 of the 20 screens are showing Not the Full Monty. It’s still the case that toffs in London get to see the new films first and us peasants out in the sticks might be allowed a very scratched and damaged copy some weeks later. So I don’t know why you bother Barry Norman – by the time I get to see it I will have forgotten what you had to say about it. Oh yes, and if it’s a film I really want to see, like say Lost Highway, my local multiplex wont show the fucking thing anyway, ever! More cinema screens, less choice. 2 THE REVIEW For some reason the director chose to film every scene through a tobacco-coloured filter, making it appear as though you, the viewer, were immersed in a bowl of urine, peering out at passing events. Whilst this has relevance to the plot, I did not find it a pleasant viewing experience. The whole thing was subdued with minimalist acting techniques to match the minimalist sets. Michael Nyman’s music was very jolly in places but otherwise the whole film is something of a downer. The idea, as you probably know by now, is that in the future only genetically engineered persons are cool whilst people born by natural means are in-valids. It’s a very interesting topic and one well worth exploring but this film fails to do the ideas justice. It’s just so cool that, in the end you don’t care very much. Pity. The players are pretty good especially Ethan Hawke as the in-valid and Jude Law as the crippled valid who supplies the necessary biological material to get Ethan accepted into the right circles. The main problem is lack of tension. Even when Ethan is being hunted down as a suspected killer the director fails to capitalise on the potential. For the odd few seconds you suspect the film is going to come alive but then it returns to plodding along towards the inevitable conclusion, letting the viewer sink further and deeper into his or her aquarium of urine. There are no car chases, nothing goes bang, crash and the sex is very subdued. Not that a film has to have sex and violence in spades but, if it doesn’t, it better offer us a very good storyline, characters and plot. Gattaca doesn’t. Pity. As Warrior Mouse commented, it is nearly a good film. But, in the end it isn’t. |