philosophical satire – Ridley Park

1–2 minutes

At last, the circle is complete. I’ve slogged through the full dystopia roster, the canonical set so beloved of memes and Venn diagrams. Orwell, Atwood, Burgess, Huxley – and now, Gattaca. Completion is satisfying, but the price of admission? Almost two hours of cinema so wooden you could build an ark.

The problem is not the premise. Genetic determinism as a caste system is a fine conceit – prescient even. But the execution? Trite, contrived, and about as subtle as an Ayn Rand sermon. This is a film with zero degrees of freedom: a script where every outcome is preordained, every obstacle contrived, every subplot bent double to guarantee Vincent’s ascent. It rails against determinism while embodying it.

And the characters? Archetypes in pressed suits. Vincent, the plucky underdog. Jerome, the fallen aristocrat with a liquor cabinet. Irene, the sceptical love interest who abruptly switches sides because the script tells her to. They don’t act, they oblige. It could just as easily have been written in the 1940s, swapped in for a Jimmy Stewart melodrama about class prejudice, courtroom vindication, and the triumph of the “human spirit.” The only modern touch is the genome gimmick.

Yes, admirers gush about its minimalism, its prescience, its “timeless” style. But strip back the sleek lines and moody jazz soundtrack, and you’re left with fortune-cookie profundities (“There is no gene for the human spirit”) welded onto a Rube Goldberg plot. It’s not timeless; it’s tired.

So yes, I’ve ticked it off the list. But at what cost? I endured the dialogue, the implausible sequencing, the endless plot coupons masquerading as destiny. Gattaca may live on in classrooms and think-pieces, but as cinema it collapses under its own deterministic weight.

Completion achieved. Satisfaction minimal.

Review by

Ridley Park

2–3 minutes

This particular meme has been making the rounds like a drunk uncle at a wedding – loud, colourful, and convinced it’s profound. A Venn diagram, no less! Four big circles stuffed with dystopias, slapped together as if geometry itself conferred wisdom. Most of them are books, a few are films, and one – Gattaca – is glaring at me because I haven’t seen it. That omission alone feels like a character flaw. I might grit my teeth and watch it just to close the loop, though it doesn’t exactly scream, “Pour a glass of wine and enjoy.”

DISCLAIMER: This is not a political post.

Here’s the thing: as art, it’s rather lovely. As a piece of intellectual cartography? It’s rubbish. It pretends to classify but in fact it merely collages. Orwell is pressed up against Burgess, Atwood rubs shoulders with Logan’s bloody Run, and in the middle sits Animal Farm, as if pigs with clipboards are somehow the Rosetta Stone of dystopia.

And yet – if you squint just so, tilt your head like a dog hearing a harmonica, you can just about see some tenuous ligatures:

Surveillance and conditioning: 1984, Clockwork Orange, and The Matrix all insist that the human mind is clay to be moulded by boot, syringe, or simulation.
Reproduction and regulation: Brave New World, The Handmaid’s Tale, and yes, Gattaca (apparently) fret endlessly over who gets to breed, who gets culled, and whose DNA deserves a future.
Bodies as resource: Soylent Green, Brazil, Gattaca again – people ground down into spreadsheets, rations, or literal mince.
The veneer of civilisation: Lord of the Flies and Animal Farm showing us that civilisation is just papier-mâché over the swamp.

But let’s be honest: the diagram isn’t actually saying this. It’s just four intersecting blobs, with titles hurled in like darts at a pub quiz. The apparent “structure” is nothing more than meme-magic – order conjured out of chaos to make you nod gravely as you scroll by.

So yes: as art, it works. As a Venn diagram, it’s a travesty. And maybe that’s the deeper joke. We live in an age where every complexity gets crushed into an infographic, every horror squeezed into a digestible meme. Which, if you think about it, is itself a bit dystopian.

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Ridley Park

Tag: philosophical satire

Gattaca (1997): Completing the List, But at What Cost?

The Dystopia Venn: Four Circles of Absolute Nonsense