Gattaca

In his new sci-fi drama, writer/director Andrew Niccol creates a "not so distant future" where genetic engineering reigns supreme -- at the expense of human diversity. In a world where petri-dish babies are manufactured for perfection, less-fortunate "god children" -- those conceived without the benefit of scientific intervention -- are automatically destined for failure. People born naturally suffer a new kind of discrimination: genoism.

Enter Vincent (Ethan Hawke), a perfect specimen of a man: intelligent, healthy, athletic, good-looking, ambitious, well-adjusted, and well-endowed. He's a "faith child," however, so to achieve his lifelong dream of space travel at the Gattaca Corporation, he has to buy and assume the identity of a genetic "superior" -- a chainsmoking alcoholic who has been paralyzed and is now willing to sell his DNA on the black market. But when Gattaca's mission director is murdered a week before Vincent, now an elite navigator, is scheduled for take-off, police threaten to brand him a killer.

Unfortunately, despite all the advances of modern science, predictable one-liners and full-circle scenes of corny machismo haven't been fully weeded out of Hollywood's gene pool. At least Gattaca have some positive traits: an aesthetic vision of the future that's stunningly realized through Frank Lloyd Wright architecture and 1940s-inspired costumes; a genuinely suspenseful plot that relies more on complex ethical ideas than on big chase scenes; and a character (the gene sellout played by Jude Law) whose charm, wit, and tragic status steal the show from the seemingly superfluous Uma Thurman and even the talented Hawke. At the Showcase, Starcase, Tri-Boro, and Woonsocket cinemas.

-- Lorelei Sharkey