Justin Bieber Needs to Watch Gattaca
The 1997 science fiction film Gattaca explores the ethical complications and societal conundrums presented by the advent of human genetic manipulation in the near future. It stars Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, and Jude Law. It’s a very good film and a powerfully told story. And recording artist Justin Bieber should see it.
Despite its lackluster performance at the box office, Gattaca received universal critical acclaim when it opened — currently holding an 82% rating on Rotten Tomatoes — with Roger Ebert calling it “one of the smartest and most provocative of science fiction films” he’d seen. If you haven’t watched it in a while, here’s the trailer:
Gattaca, which Justin Bieber should see, portrays a not-so-distant future where medical advances have allowed us to engineer and enhance the hereditary traits of babies to ensure human near-perfection. In turn, society splinters into 2 social classes — those who have been genetically enhanced, called “valids” and those who have been conceived by traditional means, called “in-valids.” Ethan Hawke plays an “in-valid” who has had to struggle throughout his life to exceed expectations and rid himself of the baggage and limitations of his social status. His performance is excellent.
Global pop phenomenon Justin Bieber would’ve been just 3 years old when Gattaca was released, but I think he’d really like it. I’ll confess that I’m not intimately familiar with his music, beyond one or two singles, but he comes across in interviews as a thoughtful and smart guy. And my hunch is since Gattaca isn’t a super popular movie, he probably just hasn’t seen it. That’s a shame. He should. It’s a beautifully shot film that raises a lot of important questions about the future and who we are both as a collective species and as individuals.
Justin Bieber owes his fame to his talents and a massive amount of early buzz and positive word-of-mouth, aided in large part by social media. For example, he’s currently one of the most-followed people on Twitter, with over 67 million followers. For the last two and a half years I have regularly used Twitter to encourage Justin Bieber to watch Gattaca.
There’s been a lot of tweets like this, to be honest. Here’s a few more.
And so on. But, despite my persistence, he’s never responded. That’s hardly surprising given how many followers he has, and how often people tweet at him. Celebrities probably get a hundred requests from a hundred different people for a hundred different reasons every day. But it doesn’t make me any less sincere in my belief that Justin Bieber should watch Gattaca, nor does it make Gattaca any less of a great viewing experience. It is.
Truth be told, I’ve only met two people who didn’t like Gattaca. One of them was my girlfriend in college, about a week before she dumped me. We watched Gattaca together (my recommendation) and afterwards I asked her what she thought and she said it lacked subtlety and handled complex moral questions clumsily. I didn’t think these were unfair points, per se, but honestly our relationship had grown pretty toxic by this point and I think she had already made up her mind to break up with me, so it wasn’t really Gattaca she was criticizing, you know? It could’ve been any movie we watched that night. In fact, I bet now that we’re both older and more mature, she’d admit that she actually thought Gattaca wasn’t that bad. I might email her after I finish writing this.
The second person I know who didn’t like Gattaca was my pastor at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Glasford, Illinois. He left the church a long time ago though — I’m not actually sure where he ended up. Anyway, the Sunday after Gattaca opened, I asked him in youth group what he thought of it. He was a big movie buff, and especially liked science fiction, so I knew he’d see it opening weekend, just as I had. I was 13 years old at the time, by the way.
I was surprised when he admitted he didn’t like Gattaca, and I asked him why. I won’t spoil the movie, but he said that a scene near the end— which depicts a team of astronauts boarding a spacecraft wearing suits and business attire didn’t seem realistic — they should be wearing helmets and appropriate astronaut suits. I told him that, while I understood what he was saying, it seemed odd for a small detail like that to derail his opinion of the film so much. Maybe if it had been a movie solely about space travel, he’d have a point. But at its heart, Gattaca isn’t a movie about space travel. It’s a movie about what makes us human and how far we’re willing to go to attain perfection — and what we’re willing to sacrifice in the process.
Getting back to my main point though, Justin Bieber really should watch Gattaca. I would never recommend it to him if I didn’t believe so strongly that he would in fact like it, and not just like it, but get a lot out of it, too. From the knockout performances delivered by the main cast, to Andrew Niccol’s sterling direction, Gattaca is a film unafraid to tackle big questions about existence and identity. All the more reason for Justin Bieber to watch it. Unless he has already. In which case, never mind.
