“describe at least one idea that changed your perspective or point of view in the film”

‘there is no gene for the human spirit’

In the futuristic film gattaca, directed by andrew niccol we are introduced into a dystopian society where your status is determined by your genetic make up. In a world where only genetic engineering can give you a perfect lifestyle as a ‘valid’ and where a natural born or genetically inferrior “god child” is identified as an ‘invalid’, vincent as an invalid overcomes his inferrior status, acheiving his goals. A piont in the film where my perception of this idea was enforced is in vincent and geromes house where we see a staircase symbolising a helix. Nearing the end of the movie we see gerome, a prevoisly perfect valid who is now only mobile from the torso up, climbing these stairs (the genetic material) with the determination to fufill vincents dream. This idea conveys to the audience that your genetic make up doesn’t limit yourself to what you are capable of, and that “there is no gene for the human spirit”. although the two men hav ecompletely diferent genetic structure they share the same spirit.

Class model answer:

the 1997 film gattaca by andrew nicol is set in a dystopian future where being anything less than genetically perfect causes you to be disadvantaged in life. the film tells us that there are some things that genetics cant determine. argueably the most important of these is ambition. at the climax of the film, jertome, who no longer has the use of his legs after a earlier suicide attemt, is shown dragging himself up a helix staircase to rescue the genetically “invalid” character Vincent from being discovered by the authorities. many point of veiw shots are used to reinforce jeromes struggly, which, because it is literally with a helix, symbolises the destructive dominance of genetics in their society. this reinforces the veiw that apparently benign genetic selection practeces could rob human society of the very forces that we value the most.

ambition cant also be influenced by genes in the sense that having a disadvantage can quite literally be the stimulis for ambition because a person who has to work harder to get where everyone else is