Re: 'I'm.Mortal' by dir. Andrew Niccol - rumors, stills,until 2012 rel
Okay, it looks super fucking cool, as I would expect an Andrew Niccol movie to look
The actual visual of the film is pretty drab, I thought. I know that's not what you mean, but aesthetically it's not as interesting as - to make hopefully a fair comparsion - Gattaca. This looks more like 'generic present day thriller WITH TWIST' than any kind of near future.
I can agree that it doesn't really compare to the aesthetic Niccol established with Gattaca. I watched the short making-of documentary that came with the anniversary BD release, and it is really amazing to watch the results, then be told about the shoestring they operated on.
But I dunno. I guess I like guns and people chasing each other and stuff.
I liked Gattaca and The Truman Show well enough, and this looks alright. Cillian Murphy is of course an excellent actor, and I've been liking Amanda Seyfried in Big Love as I've trawled through that program; of the lead actor I know very little, aber, but he has that generic leading man look down pat.
His most famous work involved his dick in a box.
I'm not so sure.
The genetic modification gives seemingly concrete scientific basis for believing some people are basically superior. There's no way that wouldn't permeate society in unsettling ways, although how exactly that'd work is perhaps more contentious.
I mean, the capacity for people to go to great lengths to hire people not based strictly on aptitude but whether or not they fit certain tribal requirements - race, religion, gender, ethnicity, politics - is kind of obvious and persistent and, in its variegated permutations, a wonderfully, nastily widespread example of human clannishness.
That can't be argued with; at the same time, if the point is to present a dystopia based purely on economic rationalism, you undermine it when the dystopia turns out just to be racists by any other name.
And here's the ultimate clique. The elite. The superior by the writ of Objective Truth. They can get to be bigots and they can do it with wonderful dispassionate reason and higher learning. The kids of those who can afford genetic modification - i.e., not your jaintor's children - can be made superior, and then the rich kids for whom science has made the class divide a meritocratic 'fact' can recruit exclusively among their own.
Thing is, and this is a really tiny, pedantic point, I don't think the method they use to do "genetic modification" (it's not genetic modification, it's embryo selection) could even be traced, short of the documents supporting it. The difference in the method of producing Vincent Freeman and Eugene Morrow is indistinguishable.
Also, unless Gattaca has a mad in-house training program and throws cash away on completely unqualified candidates, I'm pretty sure "Olympic swimmer" is not the baseline you'd want for "spaceship navigator."
Not that I'm defending the plausibility of the film overall, though.
I mean, a space program? Who the hell thinks that's in our near future anymore?
Indeed, but in fairness to that film - and In Time, it looks like - the science fiction conceit - be it genetics or time - is a pretty obvious stand in for a real arbitary dividing line among human beings: Money. Some people are loaded, and they get to have the big houses and the fancy soirees and the sling of female relatives who all have exactly the same hair for some reason.
This movie specifically? I took that as totally intentional. I thought that was the coolest image in the trailer.
Of course, the answer in Gattaca - and apparently In Time - is not to criticize the state of those who are the underclass, but to try and become the upper class. It is I suppose a very American take, but this is just an uneducated guess on my part.
Well, this is the crux of it. With Gattaca, they made it too concrete--it can still be read as metaphor, but it's about biotechnology's impact on humans, and I don't think metaphor was Niccol's intent, unlike with, say, The Truman Show (which is entirely metaphor, a metaphor I think not too many people picked up on, given how 99% of the reviews I've read about that movie think it's about reality TV--and not to get too tangential, but this is weird, since they tell you, explicitly, that it's a metaphor in the denouement: "I am the Creator"). If metaphor was his intent, he kinda messed up.
There's a problem with using emerging issues as a metaphor. When you take embryo selection, or telomere repair or however they justify immortality in In Time, you're talking about technologies which are either already in use, or technologies which are widely believed to be plausible and which we may see in our lifetimes, if not considerably sooner. We're not talking about mutants sworn to protect a world that hates and fears them anymore; we're talking about people that are being born now. We're talking about a real contemporary issue--and real human beings.
So, when Gattaca tells us these "Valids" are going to conquer and oppress us, what you've got is indeed a piece of propaganda--a neo-Luddite political film that says preimplantation genetic diagnosis leads to
this kind of society. It's far better for your brother to be born with leukemia than for Vincent Freeman to not get to see the other side of the sky.
I think In Time may suffer a lot less from this problem, because immortality is a far more distant technology, and also because the film is far more clearly a sharply-drawn allegory than what, at first blush, would appear to be a thought-through, functional fictional world. But I don't think the problem is absent: when you have lines like, "No one should live forever unless everyone can live forever," then you are at least pushing a hard-line approach to biotechnological improvement of humanity that I can't sanction, and if the film goes into "No one should live forever
at all" territory, it veers into monstrousness.
I want to live forever (and be happier, and stronger, and healthier all around); and only purest, unworthiest envy would have me deny these advances to my descendants. Don't tell me it sucks to to live forever, Andrew Niccol. I'm pretty sure you don't know.
Sorry to spend this many words on it. TLDR is a rational response.
Edit: also, this Seyfried has a really cool haircut, and women with cool hair makes me like anything better.
