A beautifully shot movie, in the era when Hollywood had perfected its film craft just before digital post production techniques started ruining it (because today it’s far too easy to do a sloppy shoot and say “we’ll fix it in post.”)
Gattaca’s cinematographer Slawomir Idziak worked with famous director Krzystof Kieslowski and shot some of his most striking films.
You’re cherry picking. If you look at the average film shot in the 70s, they were terribly lit and shot. The same thing happened then - we started having widely available cheap color film stock, and the result was a flood of poorly lit and framed films.
Lots of those people got way better tho. Hopefully the same will happen now.
I was responding to your sentiment about how digital ruined Hollywood or whatever.
It really didn’t. It just made it easier to produce things. That’s happened a few times before in film history, and the result was always an explosion in poorly lit, poorly shot films, and then slowly a filtering out that results in the next decade or two when the good people who started then become masters.
You have this in the 1960s when the French New Wave starts using the recently invented 16mm and portable film cameras to make their films, and they make a bunch of movies which don’t look that good (for my money ‘Breathless’ has some terribly lit shots).
The same thing happens in the 1970s when cheap color film stock arrives and you have an explosion of films in general, giving birth to exploitation and drive in films, many of which are again, terribly lit and sometimes poorly shot (‘Rolling Thunder’, a lot of Sam Peckinpah)
The digital revolution didn’t “ruin things” it just made it easier. And whenever that happens you often get a glut of poorly made films, and then the best people who work on those films get better, and then the films they make in the next decade or two are astonishing and amazing.
Gattaca is a good movie. I can't wait to read this. I'd also suggest William Gibson (of neuromancer fame)'s Alien script.
Lots of good suggestions in this thread. Dark City's aesthetic and story-telling style made it one of the most impactful movies I've ever seen. You are in the dark most of the movie, both in aesthetic of the film and metaphorically in the sense that you don't know what is going on, but discover it slowly, and along the way you are lead to reach premature conclusions that turn out later to be false. I haven't watched this movie in years, but it's been permanently seared into the deepest darkest corners of my mind.
Another excellent sci-fi i came across earlier this year, from the late 70's early 80's is a polish film On The Silver Globe. The special effects are nothing more than lighting, photography, writing, costumes, set design, and excellent acting, but I can still say that it's psychadelic in the way it provokes the mind, the senses, and the emotions.
>Dark City's aesthetic and story-telling style made it one of the most impactful movies I've ever seen. You are in the dark most of the movie, both in aesthetic of the film and metaphorically in the sense that you don't know what is going on, but discover it slowly, and along the way you are lead to reach premature conclusions that turn out later to be false.
I'll add that if you haven't seen Dark City and are going to watch it, you must seek out the director's cut. The theatrical cut basically ruins the plot up front assuming the audience won't get it and it changes the film dramatically.
?? I saw it in the theater when it opened. nothing was ruined. maybe there is a second cut I'm unaware of. Certainly the cut Roger Ebert gave 4/4 stars, which is the original theatrical cut, isn't the one with spoilers
"A director's cut of Dark City was officially released on DVD and Blu-ray Disc on 29 July 2008. The director's cut removes the opening narration, which Proyas felt explained too much of the plot, and includes approximately eleven minutes of additional footage, most of which extends scenes already present in the theatrical release with additional establishing shots and dialogue."
I originally saw the director's cut, then went back and watched a video with the opening narration. I felt that my viewing of the movie was improved having seen it originally without.
Here is an interview with director Alex Proyas where he explicitly discusses the removal of the opening narration [1]:
BLAKE: What is the biggest difference between it and the original?
ALEX PROYAS: The general pace of the movie is quite different. The director’s cut more or less is the version I had originally sent out when I was first testing the movie. We had problems in testing and it’s why the studio had us add in the voice overs, which I thought was rubbish really! My instinct then was when something wasn’t playing right to speed it up and I’ve never been happy with that, so this version is back to a more leisurely and thoughtful pace it was meant to be. The voice over from the beginning is gone of course. There is also a few scenes added back that were ditched that I think are perfectly good scenes and I have no idea why we dropped them then.
This made me look up what Andrew Niccol has been up to since. He had a terrific start to his career, writing and directing Gattaca and also writing The Truman Show.
But since then he seems to have fallen into a slump, directing just a handful of poorly reviewed movies in the span of 26 years. (The exception is Lord of War, which, while not a masterpiece, was quite enjoyable at the time, and has one of the most memorable opening sequences of any movie.)
This also made me think about what people like him do in the time in between. How are they earning a living? Some directors and screenwriters have gaps lasting 5-10 years between each movie they make. Much of the time must be spent trying to get projects off the ground, but who's footing the bill?
They're largely living off money from past films. Residuals help, but it's mostly the paychecks.
Screenwriting is somewhat unusual, though, in that the official credits for a film don't always represent every writer who got paid for the project. There's a whole complicated thing with establishing who gets credit and who doesn't. Union arbitration can be involved, and so on.
There's often a lot of intermediate drafts that don't lead to credit but nonetheless earn big paychecks for the writers.
And of course writers are often paid for scripts that never get made at all. The big win is writing a huge hit that earns substantial residuals for years, but there's a lot of money made at levels below that too.
As for who is footing that bill, it's the producers/studios.
That that movie was named using only the letters G, A, T and C is what prompted my wife and I to give four given names to our daughter, starting each with one of these letters (in the order G, A, T and C). Geeky enough I'd say : )
I hope for her sake they're not long names... The number of issues I've had due to too given names being too long has been quite frustrating. E.g. banking systems that can't fit my full name into their systems.
After moving into my current house, I about kicked myself because the street name has an apostrophe in it. Luckily pretty much every system now simply filters that out but there was a time when having SQL characters in your name or address could cause all kinds of havoc, not just because of Bobby Tables but also because some simply escaped the characters while others filtered them, leading to mismatches.
Agreed, one of those rare sci-fi films that does it all without green screens or rubber suits, an actual story that you care about, and want to see the ending.
Importantly, it’s one of the rarest sci fi films where there’s no “supernatural” element whatsoever- no force, no Q, no monolith. Just man against nature. Only three movies I know doing this are gattaca, Martian and the moon.
Silent Running (1972) is another one in the "man against nature" theme, and has no supernatural element. This movie is kind of a classic but tends to be forgotten, maybe because it's quite old.
And depends on what you mean by "supernatural". There are many many movies without magic, but with possible future inventions. The category of hard scifi.
Europa report, primer, deep impact, robocop, starship troopers, blade runner, matrix, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, total recall, arrival, Jurassic Park, the man from earth, ...
Well, depends if the commenter meant anything that is something we currently not only can't do, but are fairly sure isn't possible.
Terminator, BTTF: time travel. Star Trek: depends on the episode (e.g. Q, or the Daud, or time travel).
Gravity is arguably contemporary.
But yeah, like I said there's a whole category called hard scifi, so no shortage. I just took the ones off the top of my head that definitely were not supernatural.
I’d argue it’s man against nature in its rawest form. Many sci fi films try to use this as a plot point (“I know the math, punch it” in Iron man for example), but GATTACA handles it head on - the protagonist battling what’s supposedly his nature given limitations is what I would consider the main if not only quality that makes man “not natural” more so than even any artificial intelligence we may create tomorrow.
He's not battling his natural limitations. He's battling the genetic-discrimination-based oppression imposed by society: the police who will use force to stop him from doing the things of which he is naturally capable.
The hurdles aren't natural, they are human-made constructs.
I think it's at least strongly implied in the movie that he has to work much harder than (for example) his genetically superior brother to achieve the same level of performance. So maybe you're both right.
From the point of view of the Space Agency even though his ‘spot’ performance meets the grade he’s still an unacceptable risk as an astronaut - he might die during a mission potentially harming others - and if so all the resources spent on that mission and training would have been wasted.
In a sense it’s the external political struggle of whether a society allocates resources to everyone to maximise their personal potential, or focuses resources on a subset of talented individuals likely to give the best overall return.
While not a movie, I think that’s what made the original BBC[1] run of Black Mirror so eery. Everything was plausible, just a completely predictable extrapolation of current technology.
[1] not 100% it was BBC now that I think about it. Some British channel or another
It is man against machine. If we fully understand how genes work, would you trust some private company to create a trustworthy social credit score based on any potential situation, even situations that are obviously not in the data set?
The story was about people blindly trusting a machine to say "valid". The police force didn't want to figure out the crime, they just wanted to find the one without the "valid". The setting that was presented was some sort of communist utopia where the economic calculation problem has been solved through a gene scanner and central computer control.
AFAIk the ‘invalid’ was just unregistered, Vincent wasn’t just intentionally shedding someone else’s DNA he kept his own from being registered- it would have been a much shorter movie if it was.
If you mean the photo I figured that was a recreation based on the ability to predict attributes from DNA like facial structure, hair, and myopia. Myopia was listed as a known characteristic in the ‘invalid’ image. It didn’t give his name and his own brother had to work to find his identity. They go looking for the him amongst the vagrant unregistered population where it’s pointed out that they’re looking for someone smart so he’s probably not going to be there.
It could be assumed that all genetically engineered people are registered so ‘invalid’ would imply not-genetically engineered.
Modern identification based on DNA is far easier in real life as he would still share many genetic variants with his brother.
I would say Ad Astra is filled to the brim with fantastic and implausible elements. The visual design is very realistic, and this contrast adds to the movie's sense of disconnect (which is great it you like it, and a movie killer if you don't).
If we are talking at implausibility, Gravity is filled to the brim with it. It does a very lousy presentation of orbital mechanic: you don't point at a general direction of space station which is 70km away, give an impulse away from it and slowly drift to it. It is not how it works!
On top of this implausibility, the criteria in the parent post was ‘there’s no “supernatural” element whatsoever,’ which given the heroic ghost of Kowalski‘s role in saving the protagonist (as a “hallucination”), should also rule it out. Never mind that the film was essentially disorienting scenes and
Sandra Bullock repeatedly shouting into the cameras
Hallucinations aren’t supernatural. Kowalski wasn’t a ghost. This was evident in the movie.
The Martian’s bad physics and chemistry should also rule it out from the list based on your criteria. Which would be sad, because despite that, it’s a great movie and book.
Book chemistry and physics (other than dust storm) looks rather plausible, what didn't you like there? Movie added some ridiculous stuff when flying with punctured space suit, that was pathetic.
Objects in space in adjacent orbits around aren't floating in space, they are falling on Earth at a great speed. If you apply an impulse in the way as shown in the movie, you'll expand or shrink the orbit excentricity and you will likely start moving up or down rapidly relative to your target, instead of closing in. This way to get to your target you'll need to burn an insane amount of fuel and do orbit corrections every second. The right way is to make one impulse to change your orbit in such a way that your new orbit will intersect the orbit of your target (and that you both will be there at the same time), and the direction of such impulse might be far from obvious. More likely one impulse will result in a very long transit orbit, so a better course would be two or more orbital corrections.
So is The Martian. The physics in the movie and book are absolutely magical: windstorms powerful enough to impale people but not enough air pressure to require a top to the spacecraft. Toxic, perchlorate soil growing potatoes… Both the book and movie are wonderful, but have huge gaps of implausibility.
Ad Astra is "story" wrapped around visual effects to allow Brad Pitt be used as lead actor. And there could be so much to it: The emotional controls, done by I assume AI? Great plot for a dystopian society. A rogue scientist at the edge of explored space posing a big threat? The Heart of Darkness is great, regardless of version. Various powers battling of the few rocks in what is otherwise an empty solar system? The Expense shows us how great that can be.
All of that in one film? Not so much. And then there a the logic holes bigger than a smaller galaxy. Earth is facing severe energy issues, up to the point a habdfull of dudes are fighting over three luna rovers? Could be fun, ubtil one realizes that there is apparebtly enough energy to be had to kill civilisation by energy waves created somewhere around Saturn... Then Brad is sent on a secret missions, and instead of flying on a military vessel to the lunar station, he takes acivilian flight wearing uniform. Only to land travle across the moon. The inly reason for that seems to be show some fancy lunar battle scene... I could go on...
Space Cowboys so, that would fit. As would Alien and Aliens, everything after Prometeus... If I want Eric Daenicken, I go read one of his books.
If you're the Fabien Sanglard we all know, that's very interesting to hear; it's a personal favourite of mine too. Thanks much for your amazing breakdowns, and I'm glad you kept going <3
Cool! I saw this link and your books came to mind as another example of how material like this is vital for seeing (amongst other things) how creative endeavours cope with ‘the other 90 percent’ of projects.
If anyone still hasn't seen Gattaca. Seriously, go buy it, rent it, pirate it, whatever in 2160p quality and sit down in a dark quiet room and watch it without interruption or distraction.
I got into ultramarathon swimming because of that movie. I've since done numerous unaccompanied 12mile swims in nearby Lake Washington (Seattle), several accompanied sea crossings, and one 24mile swim. On every swim I think of Vincent and that phrase.
How it started -- I was swimming along the shore of the lake, figured that if I saved nothing for the journey back then the worst that could happen is I run out of energy and have to haul myself into someone's back yard and ask them for help. That wouldn't be too bad, so I might as well. It's amazing how much I can trick my brain+body into going further than it otherwise would.
I used to feel eye-rolly about people giving their kids’ names based on an interest. But I later realized that this has always been how many parents name kids, at least since religion was a thing.
The one thing that always bothered me in Gattaca: discrimination was supposedly illegal, but the police had the same scanners the corporation did to see if people were 'valid' or not. Seems like that would be inadmissible evidence!
Discrimination based on race is illegal, but police still care about race in both official and unofficial ways.
And for example, witness testimony of "I saw a white man leave the scene of the crime" would be completely admissible testimony in a trial.
So this doesn't seem like a mistake of worldbuilding to me. The way it's used in the story, it probably says some unflattering things about the police force and the society, but that seems entirely intentional.
Most white people won't have experienced that, because we're not ever in a situation where we can personally see a black person be pulled over by the police.
Pretty sure ‘valid’ was about registration; a valid entry in the database not a aspersion on the DNA. In the movie they state they’re looking for someone who is smart enough to have avoid registering all of these years. To avoid registration Vincent would have had to take even worse jobs than otherwise would have been afforded to him, similar to undocumented immigrants in the US today.
I'm going to take the inevitable downvotes, especially by people who don't want to engage and discuss, and say I wasn't a fan of Gattaca. In particular the story gets muddled for me because they made the poor choice of choosing a space mission as the background for the story.
NASA and the Air Force already have (had) a "you must have perfect genes or you don't get to be an astronaut / fighter pilot" so that part of Gattaca was not sci-fi, it was just repeating what was already true. One of my best friends in high-school, his dream was to be a fighter pilot, but he had bad vision (bad genes) and knew that was an instant "no".
In terms of the movie, the main character wants the government to risk billions of dollars on a space mission on him and he selfishly doesn't care that they're trying to lower the risk of failure by selecting only people less likely to have issues on the mission. Real space missions do the same. You aren't going to send someone who genes suggest the mission may fail. They may not give you a DNA test, but they will test tons of other things that all basically test your things you got because of your genes.
I get the movie is about trying harder than anyone else, taking risks, not letting others tell you your limits. All of that is great. But, because of the poor choice of context (billion dollar space missions) it didn't work for me because that is how billion dollar space missions are run and it made the main character kind of a jerk for risking the mission and every one else's lives.
My opinion is that the movie is trying to show that genes have less predictive power than most assume. Administrators love easy measures that simplify decisions, but real life is way more complicated than that. So the protagonist in the movie has been able to beat his genetically superior brother and thrive academically by being creative and finding ways around his natural limitations, and that scrappiness is the core feature of humanity that makes someone successful.
I got all that. They're still going to look at statistics to decide how who to risk billions of dollars on a space mission.
This is no different than say insurance companies charging more for people under 25. You might be 19 and the safest driver in the world. Doesn't matter, the statistics say, people under 25 get in accidents. Same with all kinds of things.
It's not like a space program has infinity money and sends up a rocket to Saturn every day. So, they have to lower the risks and one of the ways they do that is by trying to select extremely healthy people to be astronauts. Sure, one person how's genes say they are unhealthy might happen to outlive everyone how's genes say they are healthy but that's not how it works. They're still going to use some form of selection by genes (health, body size, eye sight, hearing, etc...) so select people they feel give the mission the highest chance of success.
If you're blind, deaf, have missing or deformed limbs, a "bad" heart, etc... you aren't going to be selected.
The movie also did a lot to turn the public against the emerging field of genetic engineering, and science in general. Even 25 years later, people cite GATTACA as a reason to avoid vaccines.
It seems to me that the overwhelming takeaway from that movie was more science is always bad, and leads to suffering and human misery. I think there were some good messages in there, but most people who I have talked to about the movie seem to have missed them, and focus entirely on how we need to outlaw any form of research into human genetics.
Everyone I have talked to that remembers the movie as well as reviews I have seen think it is about genetic engineering. The only thing the movie actually shows is genetic selection. The scientist tells Vincent's parents that only their genes will be used, though selected such that if they tried millions of times they would be unlikely to naturally get such a good combination.
At the risk of courting downvotes, Brazil from 1985. Not 100% sci-fi, as there are some comedy/fantasy/horror elements, but boy is it just wild. I don't know where Terry Gilliam gets his inspiration from.
Brazil is so billiant because it depicts a technologial socity where the technology is full of bugs and often malfunction - just like reality. Most dystopian sf assume technology just works but is used for evil purposes.
Brazil suggest the terrorist bombings are really just explosions caused by bad plumbing.
I'd say its a fine suggestion. A dystopian movie portraying a futuristic, overly bureaucractic government which is highly dependent on unreliable whimsical machines paired with a hyper consumerist society.
Robocop and Running Man portray similar scifi futures / society.
This is one of my favorite films, maybe my favorite sci-fi film. The "steampunk" way in which future technology is depicted is one of the reason Brazil aged so well IMO.
I would actually consider it to be a free adaption of Orwell's 1984.
Not at the level of Gattaca or Dark City but a few good ones filmed around the same time period - -Thirteenth Floor
-The Cell
-Strange Days
-Frequency
-Event Horizon (The Shining in deep space but very gory, especially the recording they find)
Rufus Sewell from Dark City was also on a sci-fi show called The Man in The High Castle. A great series to start but the last season was awful.
I’ll also add Children of Men, Primer, Looper, and The Thing though I don’t know these are as underrated these days.
I'll add some films that I enjoyed. Some might be flawed, some constrained by their budget etc, but overall I enjoyed watching them. Ordered alphabetical (I hope).
This is an example of why I think "underrated" is such a difficult word in the context of movie recommendations.
In my view, Moon wasn't underrated. It was very well received overall by both critics and those who saw it[1], which is inline with how I felt about it.
However, it wasn't a blockbuster, and so the chances are there are many who don't know about it and who would enjoy seeing it.
Yeah that's a good point. I couldn't think of any actually underrated movies I've seen in a while.
There's some I've enjoyed that got poor ratings, but not like they were objectively better than their reviews suggested, I was just willing to overlook their flaws.
I'm not sure if this is due to movie criticism improving, or my tastes just more closely aligning with modern trends or what. Feels like it didn't used to be true. Only thing I can guess at as a turning point was the existence of rottentomatoes.com.
For me personally I think that's a large part of it. For example I loved Dark Star, even though the main "monster" is literally and very obviously a beach ball. There was just so much else that I liked that the beach ball didn't put me off.
I've seen many movies with relatively poor ratings that I enjoyed quite a lot.
There is a big budget Hollywood movie with an A-lister that many claim has totally jacked the Moon concept. I noticed that myself without any suggestions, but I can't say anything more because it will spoil it.
Yeah, I know the one you mean. Not a bad movie either, though I think Moon did that part (and most things) better.
I looked it up and they _say_ the other movie was written before Moon came out, so it couldn't have copied, but feels like a pretty shallow denial to me. I suspect they just saw the screenplay or something, but what do I know.
The studio execs literally went "well, we can't just have one dude in the movie, so let's add sex appeal by making GERTY an actual hot woman - but she is tied to the place and can never leave the premises, just like that robot".
The Man from Earth: Holocene - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5770864/. The story seems to be that the writer of the original film's son tried to write a sequel, but failed to understand why the original worked. The imdb user reviews are pretty accurate.
Brazil, The man from Earth, Moon, The fountain, Ad Astra, Donnie Darko, Ender's Game, Edge of tomorrow, Solaris (the old one), Westworld (70s), Metropolis (the japanese anime), Dark Star (trippy, 70s, great end), Firefly series and Serenity movie, Attack the block, Fifth Element, planet of the apes (the old one), ex machina, children of men
Another Japanese soft sci-fi film is Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14500584/ (edit: which seems to be by the same writer)
One thing I've never understood is the statement (in the movie and this script) "Only minutes old, the date and cause of my death was already known." The rest of the movie (and even what the nurse is saying) only talk about life expectancy, so I can't tell how he would know that. I suppose he's exaggerating, but it's kind of weird anyway.
One of the best sci-fi movies out there, science is everything but chance and sheer willpower is its own force that can change everything. Believe in yourself.
