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"Shut up, Mom! I hate you and I'll stay out as late as I want!"

"Oh yeah? Well I know when you're gonna die, so do your damn homework before I tell you!"

The mind reels. Anyway, Vincent's parents learn from their mistake and have their next child the "natural" way. Anton Freeman is born with movie star good looks, livestock strength and an IQ two percent higher than his genetically perfect body weight at all times or your money back. This leads to some genetically influenced sibling rivalry, particularly when it comes time to go to college, which Anton does. Vincent meanwhile, gets to do what all genetically "inferior" people like him do for a living, which is clean toilets with Ernest Borgnine. If that seems preposterous to you, then you've never tried to get health insurance with a pre-existing condition, and you've never seen The Dirty Dozen, where Borgnine absolutely kills it.

Gattaca makes its point pretty clear, pretty early on. In a world where your level of design means more than your level of skill, it's a hard life for anyone who wants to depend on the latter. Intellectually, Vincent is as brilliant as anyone. It's his DNA that's the problem. The rest of the film involves what he intends to do about it.

Vincent's dream is to be an astronaut. And his toilet cleaning gig happens to be at Gattaca - a sort of future NASA where incredibly attractive graduate students are shot into space wearing business suits and hair pomade for no obvious reason. There is an elaborate security apparatus there, meaning the genetically perfect employees are asked to prove that perfection on a daily basis. They are run through an endless and incredibly invasive regimen of poking, prodding, scanning and testing that quite honestly, isn't much different from what happens to REAL astronauts. I suppose the primary difference is that at NASA, the list of available job options is probably more comprehensive than "fly rockets" or "shovel shit".

But in the movies, allegory > reality, so let's just continue.

Luckily for Vincent, there are solutions for people with this kind of problem. It seems that whenever a member of the Master Race falls on hard times his identity can be bought, for a price. Enter Jerome Morrow, who even isn't just a flawless man, but a perfect ten turned up to eleven. He's fit, brilliant, handsome, witty, and he looks like Jude Law. The problem is, Jerome was a champion athlete who became depressed after winning a mere silver medal in the Olympics, So depressed in fact, that he unsuccessfully attempted suicide, rendering himself a paraplegic. That's right - in a future where every swimmer is Michael Phelps, second place just makes you the First Loser. Now, you'd think that in a world like this, being a half paralyzed Superman tops being Jimmy Olsen, but apparently not.

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