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GATTACA micro-review
Rented it because I recall hearing that it was well received at a previous SF marathon (before I started attending it).
Hated it.
I was ready to like it (except for the totally extraneous bite-me love story). I appreciated how the setting was not a generic Orwellian dystopia, with the depiction of an honestly ambitious and successful space program keeping things nicely ambiguous. Then the ending made me retroactively hate the entire film that came before.
I thought, right up until the end, that the movie was going to defy my expectations (and Hollywood formula) by allowing the hero's male hetero buddy to survive the picture. As we all know, suspense-movie templates often demand that male hetero buddies pay for the hero's friendship with their lives. I was actually surprised when he managed to live through the police interview at his home, sure that he'd get shot or fall down the stairs or drink some bad milk or find some way to sacrifice himself to protect the hero's identity.
So then the movie's coming to a close and oh shit we forgot to kill the MHB! Ah, no worries, we'll just have him commit suicide for absolutely no reason. Also in the most excruciating way possible because it's more symbolic that way and we can do this cool parallel shot with the rocket boosters firing.
This is the first time in memory I have shut off a movie in disgust within (what I assume to be) seconds of the closing credits, so I didn't even get the grim satisfaction of feeling like I walked out on it.
Hated it.
I was ready to like it (except for the totally extraneous bite-me love story). I appreciated how the setting was not a generic Orwellian dystopia, with the depiction of an honestly ambitious and successful space program keeping things nicely ambiguous. Then the ending made me retroactively hate the entire film that came before.
I thought, right up until the end, that the movie was going to defy my expectations (and Hollywood formula) by allowing the hero's male hetero buddy to survive the picture. As we all know, suspense-movie templates often demand that male hetero buddies pay for the hero's friendship with their lives. I was actually surprised when he managed to live through the police interview at his home, sure that he'd get shot or fall down the stairs or drink some bad milk or find some way to sacrifice himself to protect the hero's identity.
So then the movie's coming to a close and oh shit we forgot to kill the MHB! Ah, no worries, we'll just have him commit suicide for absolutely no reason. Also in the most excruciating way possible because it's more symbolic that way and we can do this cool parallel shot with the rocket boosters firing.
This is the first time in memory I have shut off a movie in disgust within (what I assume to be) seconds of the closing credits, so I didn't even get the grim satisfaction of feeling like I walked out on it.
no subject
I also had an issue with a plot point at the end of the movie. It's been long enough that I don't know if it happens before or after you turned it off, but it depends on the handedness of the character, and it rang totally false to me. I'm right handed but there is a significant number of tasks that I do preferentially with my left hand. That possibility is apparently completely foreign to the characters in the movie, and hanging a plot point on that fact blew the movie's credibility for me.
no subject
I know what you're talking about with the handedness. That particular scene was also a disaster for me, but for an entirely different reason... that doctor's only dialogue up until that point involved soliloquizing about Ethan Hawke's beautiful penis, so his participation in the ending was not so much heartwarming as creepy.