it’s amazing how the accumulation of years can alter the way one thinks.

this afternoon, just when I was slowly submitting that it would be one of those lazy summer afternoons spent senselessly channel surfing and thinking about nothing really, i chanced upon a movie that i have probably seen twice or thrice before.

this time however, the movie had taken on a totally different meaning.

the movie was gattaca, which is a futuristic movie wherein people’s identities were no longer determined by their capabilities, but by a series of processes which predetermined their existence later on in life. the sophisticated technology enabled medical practitioners to predict if a child was someone potentially great, or conversely, a mediocre citizen in the future — so they stratified society according to these established standards — such that even before people established their own niche in society, they already had a future mapped out for them.

the movie takes on an interesting turn however, when vincent, who was diagnosed to be sickly (or a degenerate, as how society tagged him) and thus incapable of greatness, decided to fight the odds and disprove society’s consensual construction on the notions of greatness and obscurity.

he braved the tide, and went against society, albeit covertly, and in the end, he triumphed against the skewed societal conventions that were deeply entrenched and firmly established. he showed, by being daring and discarding the unreasonably rigid prerequisites for greatness that were in place, that the human spirit can transcend the most sophisticated of standards and do away with the predetermined notions of existence — because after all, the human spirit is much more complex than a series of DNAs (which really prevents one from self-actualization).

as i have said earlier, i’ve probably seen the movie twice or thrice before — but on very different times and circumstances in my life, such that i never fully appreciated the movie not just for its cinematic, but philosophical worth as well. if i remember it correctly, i was asleep the whole time when i first attempted to watch the movie. note that i used the word ‘attempt’

it was on second year high school, and i was expecting a visual spectacle of laser guns, light sabers, and silver-suited extra-terrestrial beings battling it out with the earth’s finest — so when i was dismayed by the seriousness of the movie’s tone right at the start, i thought it better to just doze off and look for the visual spectacle elsewhere.

but this time, it got me thinking –

gattaca challenges the way people think — because instead of submitting to societal standards which inevitably do away with a person’s potential, the movie compels us to rethink how society comes up with its standards — but it does not end there, for it encourages people to rise from the depths of apathy and rally against the tyrants which determine the fate and course of our existence. tyrants, after all, do everything to convince their unsuspecting subjects that their perversion of society is the way to go — in the hopes of normalizing oppression and perpetuating their continued dominance.

but then again, the human spirit is capable of so much more — and it cannot be held captive by these deceptive ploys — because even if the tyrant is initially successful in transforming society according to his whims, he can never completely do away with the human spirit — because all of us, no matter how insignificant we may appear to society, are endowed with wisdom and heart — and it is this intrinsic human attribute which, among all other things, determines how our lives will turn out in the long run.