Andrew Niccol Research Articles

A Nuanced Outlook of Human Perfection in Andrew Niccol's Movie, Gattaca

Andrew Niccol's 1997 movie Gattaca pictures a world where parents can engineer genetically strong kids and those who come without prior engineering are seriously at disadvantage. While freedom of perfection creates a borderless autonomy for any parent to choose their child's destiny, equally it tames those who were not engineered by science but by fate. The movie therefore poses an important question regarding the definition of perfection in a society where genetics shapes much of an individual’s identity. This research employs Rene Descartes’ concept of mind-body dichotomy to justify the stance of Vincent’s eventual success to get into Gattaca despite being an invalid in a society where genetically engineered children are the highlight. It doesn’t however deal not so much with the age long debate about technology versus human as it does about subtle humane virtues, will power, desirability and ambitions that stands out despite the border of genetic engineering that tries to subdue it.

앤드류 니콜의Good Kill에 나타난 드론 전쟁의 부당성에 대한 저항

Following the 9/11 attacks, the United States turned to drone warfare in its fight against terrorism, as drones proved to be both cost-effective and politically safer than manned fighter jets. The Obama administration, believing in the effectiveness and morality of drones, expanded and intensified drone operations compared to its predecessor. However, Andrew Niccol’s 2014 film, Good Kill, uncovers the injustices of the CIA-led drone strikes and the growing opposition against them. The movie highlights the psychological burden on drone pilots, who face an identity crisis due to their detachment from direct combat, and struggle to balance family life with the stress of participating in unequal warfare. Their families, unable to help alleviate the pilots’ psychological anxiety, instead experience crises brought on by the pilots’ stress.BR Additionally, the film emphasizes the undemocratic nature of CIA-led drone warfare, characterized by a lack of transparency and limited oversight by the public, media, and Congress. The CIA’s arbitrary application of signature strikes and threats of imminent attacks has led to civilian casualties, the division of communities, and the violation of international law. Drone strikes have been conducted within the territories of non-conflicting countries such as Pakistan and Yemen, undermining their sovereignty. These actions have fueled anti-American sentiment, support for extremist militants, and violent counterattacks against U.S. drone strikes, leading to a vicious cycle of violence and global instability.BR In response, the film’s protagonist, Tommy, sympathizes with his co-pilot, Suarez, and decides to sabotage the CIA’s operation arbitrarily applying the principles of signature strikes and proportionality. He makes an overt protest against drone warfare by leaving the military. Ultimately, Good Kill warns of the danger posed by drone warfare and calls for a ban on armed drones to prevent further proliferation and to protect the world from uncontrollable dangers.

Screening Drone Warfare

While war films contribute to the construction of collective memory, few of them address the changes implied by drone warfare. Drone operators work from remote places and share only one space: the screen that conveys drone images. The possibilities for dramatic actions are too few for a spectacular mise-en-scene: Eye in the Sky (Gavin Hood, 2016) and The Good Kill (Andrew Niccol, 2014) slow down the pace of the narrative to focus on the drones’ power of surveillance. The duration of observation sequences creates spaces for reflection and ethical debates about the military strategy of drone strikes. Such reflection pervades National Bird (Sonya Kennebeck, 2016) and Drone (Tonje Hessen Schei, 2014), two documentaries built from the testimonies of drone operators. This article explores the questions posed in theses fiction and non-fiction films through referring to growing drone literature developed in response to the political arguments in favor of drone warfare.

Ambivalence of social and private in the film text Gattaca by Andrew Niccol and the story Ivan Ivanovich by Mykola Khvylovy

The alignment of the studied discourses has been done under the rubric of similarities between heteromedial semiotic entities; their status is that of aesthetic objects. The paper focuses on the dilemmas of contemporary interart studies and is based on so-called poststructuralist theory (most notably in the work of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze). The issues of the politics of human bodies, the excerpts of Jung’s analytical psychoanalysis, Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh of the world” notion, Sartre’s returned look / gaze clarifications have been expounded in the paper. Various concepts and precepts that legitimately pertain to cinematograph and literature account for the general common things in the fictional world both on screen and within the cover of the book, as well as for the bodies in the worlds external to that screen and book. In this respect the recurrence concept, the shadow archetype, the illness / sickness dichotomy expounding, regime / diet interpretations have been articulated in the paper. The analysis of the characters has been conducted with reference to their actions and goals through the prism of the aforementioned categories.

Construções Imaginadas: a estética da intervenção digital

Este estudo tem como objetivo analisar o impacto da intervenção digital, tendo como corpus imagens de três filmes com construções criativas, de persuasão e sedução, criando ilusões virtuais: SimOne (Andrew Niccol, 2002),The App (Elisa Fukasa, 2019) e Her (Spike Jonze, 2013). O protagonista de The App é induzido a acreditar que está falando com alguém intrigante; o de Her, apesar de aceitar a virtualidade, deve admitir o fim de sua experiência digital. Em SimOne, a invenção da imagem da atriz convence espectadores, mas por tempo limitado. Apresento como relevantes os conceitos de Peter Weibel (2005) de “post-media computer possibilities”, que Lev Manovich (2001) denomina de “post-media aesthetics”, mas sugiro outra possibilidade, ao aplicar o conceito de “estética da hipervenção”, “hiper” embasado na hiper-realidade de Baudrillard e “venção” como invenção/intervenção digital. A metodologia de base adotada para a análise é a dialética de Hans-Georg Gadamer.Palavras-chave:Estética da Hipervenção. Hiper-realidade. Imagens Virtuais. Pós-mídia. Tecnologias Digitais

Perfecting Bodies: Who Are the Disabled in Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca?

This paper will examine the impact of genetic technologies on the corporeal and economical aspects of human lives while emphasizing the ambiguity of disability under these subversive circumstances. In 2013, the world was introduced to CRISPR genetic editing technology, followed by the controversial announcement in 2018 from Chinese scientist He Jiankui, who claims to have genetically engineered twins that were born HIV-immune. The possible social outcome of genetic treatment leading to the alteration of human embryos to create physically and intellectually superior offspring, as well as its impact on the social treatment of disabled bodies, is clearly illustrated in Andrew Niccol’s directive debut Gattaca. Here, I will discuss Niccol’s utilization of disabled characters in interrogating the employment of disabled characters as a narrative vehicle to reflect upon social paradigms. I examine both the subversion and expansion of the social construct of disability in Gattaca’s narrative, emphasizing the film’s portrayal of economic differences as a disabling factor in a world of augmentative technology.

Human-Alien Encounters in Science Fiction: A Postcolonial Perspective

Abstract An (un)conventional encounter between humans and alien beings has long been one of the main thematic preoccupations of the genre of science fiction. Such stories would thus include typical invasion narratives, as in the case of the three science fiction films I will discuss in the present paper: the Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956; Philip Kaufman, 1978; Abel Ferrara, 1993), The Host (Andrew Niccol, 2013), and Avatar (James Cameron, 2009). I will examine the films in relation to postcolonial theories, while attempting to look at the ways of revisiting one’s history and culture (both alien and human) in the films’ worlds that takes place in order to uncover and heal the violent effects of colonization. In my reading of the films I will shed light on the specific processes of identity formation (of an individual or a group), and the possibilities of individual and communal recuperation through memories, rites of passages, as well as hybridization. I will argue that the colonized human or alien body can serve either as a mediator between the two cultures, or as an agent which fundamentally distances two separate civilizations, thus irrevocably bringing about the loss of identity, as well as the lack of comprehension of cultural differences.

The odds are never in your favor: the form and function of American cinema’s neoliberal dystopias

ABSTRACTThis article explores the ways in which dystopian cinema that emerged in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 provided pointed critique of two aspects of neoliberalism’s economic and social policies: the deliberate imposition of precariousness across the working population which neutralizes dissent and forestalls collective opposition, and spatial segregation of rich and poor that is rigidly enforced. In In Time (Andrew Niccol, 2011), The Hunger Games (Gary Ross, 2012) and Elysium (Neil Blomkamp, 2013), the poor are plagued by uncertain employment, housing and healthcare, barely surviving under authoritarian regimes organized in favor of the rich and powerful. Despite the pointedness of this critique, however, this article also demonstrates how all three examples remain preoccupied with the possibility that heroic individuals can effect radical change, thereby providing a buttress to one of neoliberalism’s central animating constructs. In some senses, they indulge in a form of ‘cruel optimism,’ suggesting that precariousness and inequality could be overcome by individuals with special qualities, when real solutions to these problems seem so elusive. This article therefore questions the purpose of these films in the contemporary moment, where neoliberalism is in its death throes, but nothing coherent has yet emerged to replace it.

Science fiction and human enhancement: radical life-extension in the movie 'In Time' (2011).

The ethics of human enhancement has been a hotly debated topic in the last 15years. In this debate, some advocate examining science fiction stories to elucidate the ethical issues regarding the current phenomenon of human enhancement. Stories from science fiction seem well suited to analyze biomedical advances, providing some possible case studies. Of particular interest is the work of screenwriter Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, S1m0ne, In Time, and Good Kill), which often focuses on ethical questions raised by the use of new technologies. Examining the movie In Time (2011), the aim of this paper is to show how science fiction can contribute to the ethical debate of human enhancement. In Time provides an interesting case study to explore what could be some of the consequences of radical life-extension technologies. In this paper, we will show how arguments regarding radical life-extension portrayed in this particular movie differ from what is found in the scientific literature. We will see how In Time gives flesh to arguments defending or rejecting radical life-extension. It articulates feelings of unease, alienation and boredom associated with this possibility. Finally, this article will conclude that science fiction movies in general, and In Time in particular, are a valuable resource for a broad and comprehensive debate about our coming future.

Intertextuality in a novelistic plot of the movie «Simone» of Andrew Niccol

In this article is made an attempt to realize intertextual potential and the corresponding game strategy forming a literature centrality originality of the movie «Simone» of Andrew Niccol. According to the declared concept has been defined during the analysis a number of key positions. In the film are revealed various intertextual sendings. Have been comprehended a simulacrum in Simone's nature and factors of virtual reality. Manifestations of tricksters and faustian spirit are analysed in the hero of the movie – Victor Taransky.Addressing interpretation of the movie "Simone" (2002) of Andrew Niccol, it should be noted that the intertextuality setting a literature centrality to a movie plot, expands a genre framework and fills the film text with various meanings. Dialogue of cinema with ample opportunities of computer space promotes remoteness from realness, at the same time factual reflects present reception, her mythologization and an originality of existence in this framework of culture.The special role of Victor Taransky as intermediary highlights the tricksters beginning in the hero. In the western culture on an equal basis with trickster there is Faust, at the same time similar and other than him, who symbolizes special type of spirit of the person and culture. During the research identification of the simulacrum and intertextual nature of the heroine allows to digest the fact of a mythologization of attitude of epochal crisis. It is obvious anecdotally of a plot of the movie about love of the uncountable audience for the nonexistent actress that on process passes into a mode of a parable.

Keeping Workers at a Distance: The Connection Between Borders and Finance in Andrew Niccol’s In Time

ABSTRACTThis article presents In Time (Andrew Niccol, 2011) as a film that illuminates the role of borders at a local level and their relationship with the transnational interests of financial corporations. In Time imagines a near future in which time has replaced money as the currency. In this world, people have been genetically engineered to stop aging at 25, so, when they reach that age, they have to earn time or they die within a year. The film, shot in Los Angeles, portrays a world divided into “zones” and focuses on two of them: Dayton, a working-class area, and New Greenwich, a financial district. Drawing on this setting, In Time explores the roles of borders in the processes by which the later extracts value from the former. In order to investigate such processes, I consider the different kinds of borders that appear in the film, including not only fences and walls, but also other borders related to wealth, time, etiquette, behaviour, race, and surveillance. Close examination of borders, spatial dynamics, and characters’ behaviour elucidate the rationale behind the socioeconomic structures that the film depicts, who benefits from them, and what their interests are. Focusing on such aspects, this article argues that the different borders that appear in the film control the movement of people and money, thereby contributing to several conditions that benefit financial firms: the generalisation of debt, the casualisation of labour, workers’ resignation, the protection of the financial sector, and the criminalisation of the poor.

Hollywood’s Africa after 1994

In this book, Mary Ellen Higgins, who has numerous previously published essays on the literary and cinematic representations of human rights, has brought together fifteen intriguing essays by a multidisciplinary community of contributors to examine Hollywood’s representations of Africa. Their historical starting point—1994, the year of the genocide in Rwanda—stems from how that event captured the attention of human rights activists and Hollywood celebrities to yield a symbiosis of sorts in which Hollywood made human rights films and activists saw film as a means to motivate viewer campaigns against human rights violation. These recent films have human rights issues as their “major thrust” but oftenmix the issues withHollywood’s bequeathed legacy of “colonial” tropes that cast Africa as dangerous, exotic, and savage, and render the people and places of the continent as amere backdrop forWestern protagonists and perspectives. The films discussed range in the book from big-budget studio productions to independent and transnational outputs that engage with Hollywood’s legacies. The films are Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda, Edward Hick’s Blood Diamond, Kevin Macdonald’s Last King of Scotland, Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern’s The Devil Came onHorseback, Phillip Noyce and TomHooper’s Red Dust andCatch a Fire, Darell Roodt’s Dangerous Ground and Cry the Beloved Country, Neil Blompkamp’s District 9, Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, Anton Fuqua’s Tears of the Sun, Peter Raymont’s Shake Hands With the Devil, Fernando Meirellis’s The Constant Gardener, Peter Jackson’s King Kong, Andrew Niccol’s Lord of War, Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, Newton Aduaka’s Ezra, and Mahmet Selah-Haroun’s Bye Bye Africa. The book’s driving question is: How can Hollywood’s Africa be characterized after 1994 and how has this been challenged, changed, and/or updated? In other BOOK REVIEW

Education, transhumanism and eugenics in science fiction works of Huxley, Asimov and Niccol

Science fiction literature and film are often seen as a mere pastime. However, science fiction literature and film are a critique of the ideas propagated in the time of the author and of the possible outcomes technological advancements might have on society. The goal of this paper is to give a critical overview on the ways the subject of education has been regarded in Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World'(1932), Isaac Asimov's 'The Naked Sun'(l957), and Andrew Niccol's film 'Gattaca'(1997). Education was often seen as a means of social control, and in the case of afore mentioned authors it is a means by which a dystopian society achieves subjugation of the subjects. The pillars of such educational systems are elimination of free thought, over-reliance on technology and education is often coupled with eugenics and transhumanism. The paper will also discuss the basic ideas behind eugenics and transhumanism as well as the relationship between the eugenic and transhumanist movements.

‘Paradise falls: a land lost in time’: representing credit, debt and work after the crisis

This article examines the way in which credit and debt have been explored since the 2008 crisis: suggesting a formal analogue in which an abstracted financial capital (credit) has been contrasted against its concrete productive counterpart (debt). The first half of the paper traces this contrast through the theoretical vocabularies for credit and debt that have emerged in the wake of the crisis, in which debt has been separated from credit and the possibility that the former can be read as resisting the latter's dependence on financialisation has been explored. In the second half, I explore this dyad as it is made evident in two very recent films, Andrew Niccol's 2011 In Time and Rian Johnson's 2012 Looper, which offer an alternative model of social debt, one that uses the connection between time and work to actively critique the movement from productive to financial capital. These two films, I want to suggest, engage with the difficulties of representing the ‘concrete’ nature of productive capital by both thematically and formally foregrounding its literalism.

‘The exchange of two fantasies and the contact of two epidermises’: gestures of touch in Gattaca (1997), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) and The Piano (1993)

Touch in film can communicate the success or failure of desire. The social contact of two epidermises – as defined by Chamfort in 1796 – is often mediate or indirect. Theorised by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, the caress is the inverse of the haptic grasp. In this essay I look at two versions of the caressive gesture, found in Jane Campion’s The Piano, Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca and Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley. In no case is this simply the action of sexual desire, though it may also be that. In each of the films, these gestures are born not so much out of the wish to have as the wish to be. In The Piano, the non-haptic caress turns over, using the back of the hand to touch the other – the husband, the child, the piano, the sea – and this is part of the release of the protagonist Ada from the autistic ‘egg’ in which she is initially enclosed. In Gattaca and The Talented Mr Ripley, the desire to be the more successful other is expressed in two related ways: by the touch of the face on a garment and in the visible blending of two faces into one.

The Chronopolitical Order of Things: Technologies of the Quantified Self in Andrew Niccol's In Time and Michael Anderson's Logan's Run

As a film about a science fictional future in which genetic engineering is used to guard against the threat of overpopulation, Andrew Niccol's In Time (2011) bears a remarkable resemblance to Michael Anderson's environmental dystopia Logan's Run (1976). This article traces the narrative similarities of these two dystopian ecocinematic Hollywood productions, while demonstrating how they succeed as social critiques of technoscientific social regimes that wreak havoc on the Earth and its inhabitants. Borrowing from Michel Foucault's theories of a biopolitics of the population, this article argues that both film-makers' works contribute to our understanding of the potentially culturally and environmentally devastating implications of genetic engineering. Seen through the lens of Foucault's ideas about the disciplinary technologies of the self-regulated subject, the article suggests that Niccol's In Time is particularly noteworthy for its creative problematizing of the increasing normalization of high-tech bodily modification, enhancement, and digital quantification.

‘We’re Okay with Fake’: Cybercinematography and the Spectre of Virtual Actors in S1MØNE

This article considers Andrew Niccol’s comedic cyberpunk film S1MØNE, a story about the development of computer-generated animated actors. When a has-been Hollywood director secretly uploads a digital actress to save his career, passing her off as real, fans fall for the trick and delight in the newest ‘It girl’. Soon the synthespian’s celebrity eclipses the director’s fame, yet he finds it impossibly difficult to delete the program and get the genie back into the bottle. Niccol’s film is part cinematic fable and part philosophical inquiry into how the use of virtual actors (‘vactors’) in Hollywood cinema will affect filmmakers, actors and audiences.

Plato, Christianity, and the Cinematic Craft of Andrew Niccol

Plato, Christianity, and the Cinematic Craft of Andrew Niccol

A Theme Park Built for One: The New Urbanism vs. Disney Design in The Truman Show

In the summer of 1996, director Peter Weir and his location managers visited a small town on Florida's Gulf Coast to scout locations for their new film, The Truman Show, the tale of a young man, Truman Burbank, who literally (and unwittingly) lives inside a television program. Everything Truman knows or has known in his entire life - friends, family, even the town in which he lives or the sky he sees at night - has been fabricated solely to perpetuate Truman's ignorance about the fact that billions worldwide view his existence daily. The screenwriter, Andrew Niccol (whose eye for visionary architecture had inspired him to shoot much of his own film, Gattaca, in Frank Lloyd Wright's Marin County Community Center the previous year), had planned to use Manhattan as the setting for this new film. Weir, however, felt, the story might benefit from a more unknown, 'idealized' location, and the crew finally settled on Seaside, an experiment in 'neotraditionalist' community design. The result of this decision provided the world with its first 'big-screen' exposure to a New Urbanist community.

Recreating Prometheus

Recreating Prometheus