Gattaca

 I wasn't honestly excited to watch Gattaca mainly because Ethan Hawke was the one of the main stars. Perhaps if it was Training Day, I might have had a little bit more enthusiasm. Gattaca was actually interesting from a hybrid dystopian film where the problem isn’t man vs cyborgs but a realistic problem with the advancement of human anatomy. However, the film itself still lacked an interesting catch and because of no punch or catch, the film was on the more boring side for me. Where Gattaca was very interesting was somewhat similarities to the Handmaids Tale in the sense of discrimination based on who you are biologically and the culture or dystopia that the protagonist find themselves in. Vincent is basically cast aside and discriminated against because of the fact he isn't a super human or had any genetic alterations. This film sheds light on how the last few decades we have tried to clone ourselves and change our genomics which in a way is like playing God. We see this almost once a week with NBC World News with Brian Williams that scientific research centers have made another breakthrough in human genomics. As interesting as these reports maybe, people need to ask themselves if perfecting human genetics is must, where should we stop? The reason for that question is very simple in how much alteration to genetics is enough to satisfy our desires to change ourselves. Although I support genomic research, Gattaca shows great symbolism in how through human genetic change, it shows the process of cloning and tampering with natural human DNA is actual an unnatural process that we as humans are actually trying to go above our natural evolutionary principles and evolving at high speed and dangerous rate. However, in the film, the one thing that Vincent has in the other super humans is that he is highly intellectual whereas the super humans are only physically more superior making it that our level of intellect cannot actual be manipulated and is in true hereditary genetics. When it comes to this film being a dystopian film, for some reason I felt that out of all the films we have watched, this actually seems like the most realistic possibility for our future. (If we covered the Terminator, it would have been second) The reason why this film is so crucial to us is that this process of human genetic modifying is happening right now as we speak and is only going to move in this direction. I’ve always felt that since the invention of television, the human race has tried and succeeded in going above its evolutionary traits in always trying to go farther and farther along without seeing the implications of what we create and how it affects us.  As much as I enjoy seeing progression in this world from a scientific point, we should learn to take advice from our senior citizens and “stop to smell the roses”. Because if we don’t learn to slow it down, we will no longer be humans and cause our own extinction.