Then, after a pause and a sideways glance at the father: "Heart
disorder probability, 99 percent. Early fatal potential. Life
expectancy, 30.2 years." Dad is devastated. Only 30 years? On
second thought, maybe he'll make the next boy his namesake.
Like most scenes in "Gattaca," the science-fiction film that
opened Friday, this one evokes the perils of genetic testing. In
another sense, however, it could be an allegory for the risky birth
of the film itself.

A comedy or action film is born every hour, but a drama focused
on a serious scientific issue is a rare breed, one fraught with
congenital handicaps.

Prone to hype, inaccuracy and bloodlessness (call it a high
heart-disorder probability), such issue-oriented films tend to sell
their subjects short (see "Outbreak") or sag under their own good
intentions (see "Contact"). They are, in the futuristic lingo of
"Gattaca," "faith babies."

Good breeding isn't everything after all. That, at least, is
what "Gattaca" leads you to believe. The baby grows up dreaming of
becoming an astronaut, despite his imperfect genes. Unfortunately,
discrimination has become a science in the 21st century.

Most children are engineered to perfection; the few who are
naturally conceived are considered "in-valids," "degenerates." To
ferret them out, employers give DNA tests at every turn. As the hero
(Ethan Hawke) puts it, "It didn't matter how much I lied on my
resume; my resume was in my cells."

Only by hiring a double who is genetically perfect and using
that man's urine and blood samples can he hope to make it through
the aerospace academy.

Seriously fine-tuning

With its high-concept premise and novice director (Andrew
Niccol), "Gattaca," like its hero, would appear to have the odds
against it. Yet it manages to be moving and relevant - even if its
science is less than instructive.

When two parents decide to have a child, their egg and sperm are
extracted and combined to form an embryo. Then the fine-tuning
begins.

"I've taken the liberty of eradicating any potentially
prejudicial conditions - premature baldness, myopia, alcoholism and
addictive susceptibility, propensity for violence, obesity,
etcetera," a technician explains. "This child is still you, simply
the best of you. You could have conceived naturally a thousand times
and never had such a result."

There's just enough truth in that vision to make the falsehoods
dangerous. Yes, test-tube babies have been around for 20 years, and
fetuses can be screened for Down syndrome and other conditions. And
yes, biologists keep finding genes linked to behaviors such as
alcoholism and manic depression. But most traits don't flow from
single genes. Even if they did, most of them couldn't be added or
subtracted like options on a new car.

Depending on the environment within a cell, within a womb,
within the world at large, a gene's products might have myriad
effects. "There is no gene for the human spirit," the primary
advertising slogan for "Gattaca" reads. Then again, there isn't one
for much else, either.

"Gattaca," paradoxically, buys into the very genetic determinism
that oppresses its hero. "What if someone exceeds their potential?"
a character asks. "That simply means that they did not accurately
measure their potential in the first place."

Like all good science fiction, "Gattaca" ends up saying less
about the future than it does about the present. No genetic test
ever will predict the time and cause of a baby's death.

Yet the birth scene in "Gattaca" is true to life in more subtle
ways. Watching it, you might be reminded of your own child's birth
and rearing - of ultrasound and Apgar scores, SATs and ZIP-code
marketing, and all the other schemes that track us from conception
to death, determining our scholarships, our jobs, our junk mail.
This is a society already mad for classification. Genetic testing
only confirms the trend.

"Gattaca" is full of such unsettling correspondences. Its
central symbols - brothers swimming side by side, one genetically
perfect, the other flawed; rockets streaming toward Titan; a
crippled man dragging himself up a double-helix staircase - are both
futuristic and timeless. They carry the story where slicker, less
ambitious films would falter.

One could hope for no more from a faith baby.

Burkhard Bilger, Splicing into some serious gray areas // `Gattaca' is a rarity: a thoughtful science-fiction Hollywood offering. , Minneapolis Star Tribune, 10-26-1997, pp 14F.