CHIPS OFF THE OLD TEST TUBE

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

In the very near future the world is divided into the genetic haves and have-nots. The former are designed in labs prior to conception; with a twist on this DNA strand, a tug on that one, they come out smart, handsome and spared even such minor inconveniences as lefthandedness. The have-nots, products of their parents' taking a romantic free fall into the gene pool, are condemned to hard labor in support of their superiors. They are also burdened with flightier emotions.

Literally so, in the case of an "in-valid" (nice pun there) named Vincent (Ethan Hawke), who since childhood has dreamed of being an astronaut. As we discover him at the beginning of Gattaca, he's on the brink of achieving this goal--he has formed an alliance with a valid (Jude Law) who has been invalidated by an accident. For a fee, the valid supplies Vincent with the stuff he needs--including blood and urine--to satisfy the endless identity checks at the space agency where he works.

This is not a bad premise for a cautionary science-fiction tale. And anyone who has cheated on an expense account can identify with a character like Hawke's, working a much bigger scam on a bureaucracy quiveringly alert to genetic impostors. A lost eyelash, a bit of exfoliated skin left on his keyboard could undo him--especially when the cops, led by a very querulous Alan Arkin, suddenly descend on his facility and, as they investigate a murder, start subjecting everyone's detritus to genetic spot checks.

Writer-director Andrew Niccol, a New Zealander up out of commercials and making his debut in features, is less successful with the big things than he is with these little ones. His vision of a heavily sanitized and overrational future is perhaps inevitably more chilly than chilling. And since emotion has been bred out of most of the people he's concerned with, the movie's relationships--notably a romance between Vincent and a co-worker played by Uma Thurman--tend to be distant and not very involving.

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 up to be.

--By Richard Schickel