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Still, one has to admire a lot of his refusals. Niccol doesn't turn his film into a big chase or gunfight. He has serious matters on his mind and attends to them soberly, with the humanistic intensity--naively instructional yet rather touchingly earnest--that marked the sci-fi of the 1950s, when it was widely discovered that the future might not be all it was cracked...
...Gattaca sucks you in visually, drawing attention away from the dramatic flaws. There's a cool, postmodern bleakness to Niccol's vision, and a deftly understated mingling of present-day genetic and computer/technological paranoia, which proves more effective than a flashier sci-fi approach would have been. Niccol also has a way with suspended images, and his most inspired moments, in fact, are purely visual: a pool of blood, spreading from an unseen source, blots the frigidly hygienic, monochromatic polish of Gattaca; a conventionally romantic evening at a piano recital turns suddenly surreal with the appearance of an immaculate...
...sound that might be described as big-band noir, with blaring horns and desperate, almost manic vocals. Another, Half Day Closing, ends with Gibbons' eerie wail twisting wraithlike into the ether. And Humming opens with a portentous Moog-synthesizer solo that seems borrowed, in mood, from a '50s sci-fi film. The songs on Portishead have one unifying feature: they all seem constructed on a wasteland of despair. Producer-songwriter Geoff Barrow, who, along with Gibbons, forms the core of Portishead, says simply, "I'm not a very optimistic person, really...
www.music.sony.com/Music/ArtistInfo/JudgeDredd/index.html Cop Land made Stallone an acteur, but a site from this sci-fi nightmare (describing Dredd as "judge, jury and executioner") is a blast of Sly's past. Can't he sentence this ugly memorial to death...
...more years and we'd slip further, into the bright, white bald-headed life of THX-1138 (1970), George Lucas' art-house sci-fi first feature, expanded from a student film he did at USC. Robert Duvall stars with Donald Pleasance (an easy bit of casting); look for cameos by Yul Brynner and Chiang Kai-Shek. Imagine a world of naked sadism, prescription drugs and robot policemen ? where the only erotic words are "no one is watching," and everyone really is. Imagine a bleak, bleached future in which "sexual perversion" (in this case, just regular sex) was a punishable crime...