Film background.

Gattaca was directed by Andrew Niccol. He is a director without much experience. Until now, he has directed just four films, and they all are similar in one thing: they criticize society.

In Gattaca he explains us the way the society wants to feel sure about the progress and, due to that, it discriminates the small parts of the society which may be, in some way, harmful to them. That is why they do not believe in the capabilities of an “in-valid” even if he, Jerome or Vincent, is able to do even more than a “valid”.

In other films, as S1m0ne, Niccol shows us the way the society wants to see whatever it wants. When a man wants to reveal a secret but everybody wants to believe the opposite thing nobody believes him, even if saying it would make him less wealthy.

In Lord of War, he criticizes in a very strong way the capitalism in general. With a weird mastery he shows us the way the money is related to wars and global problems. He also shows us a protagonist who makes excuses for himself so he thinks he does good things, another way to masterstroke our society.

In In time he extremes his critical opinion to the society. He makes a big separation between people with powers and people without powers and, as happens in Gattaca, he completely deletes the possibility of progression, destroying in that way the men dreams. However, as usual in films, the protagonist is able to scape from that problems.

The genre of this film is, clearly, the science fiction, but in a sub genre called Bio-punk. This sub genre is all about the science fiction which focus on the consequences of the increasing knowledge in biotechnology. This is actually easy to see in this film where humans know everything about the human genome and are able to know everything about a person in a few seconds and working with them like biological machines.

This film is mostly directed to a young part of the population, and most reasons to think so are :

• The protagonist is a young man.
• It is about the desire to improve, something common in this part of the population.
• It has some elements from the future, and most of the science fiction fans are young people who wants to know more about the future, which is their future.

If we try to establish a comparison with some movies of the same genre, we see a clear difference between these ones and Gattaca. Gattaca has got an almost total absence of special effects. In science fiction film special effects are very important, because they state the difference between a film and a book. However, this may be justified because the film is not really modern (1997) and the plot has got the most of the importance on its own.