Gattaca.

Written and directed by Andrew Niccol (Columbia)

Reviewed by Jan Stuart

A lab technician admires Ethan Hawke's endowment, makes a gratuitous comment about his own son so that we know he's really not queer, and Gattaca is off and crawling.

In Andrew Niccol's assertively laguid debut feature, Hawke plays a genetically deficient slob in a futuristic brave new world of perfect petri-dish babies. To realize his dream of joining the supermodel types who get to fly to distant planets, he assumes the identity of a crippled swimmer (Jude Law--yes!) who provides him with a steady supply of grade-A bodily fluids. Intravenously, alas.

For love interest, Hawke shares his fluids with Uma Thurman, and for pedigree, Gore Vidal shows up in a juiceless turn as the space mission's director. It's all about the triumph of will over biological weakness: As Michael Nyman's poignant score drills a hole into our hearts, Hawke runs a Perils of Pauline course of obstacles (including a murder accusation) to sustain his phony identity. At the eleventh hour the lab technician saves the day, proving there is hope for closet cases in the 21st century.

You have to admire Niccol's humanizing agenda in movie terrain usually crowded with numbing technology and digital stereo explosions. But jeez, what a downer. In the subgenre of slo-mo sci-fi, Gattaca makes 2001: A Space Odyssey look like a slalom race.