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When the troopers manage to capture one of the brain bugs, their parapsychologist high-school pal, now an intelligence officer, arrives decked out in a Gestapo-style trench coat and black fedora to explain what has been going on. He examines the captive brain bug and deduces what the hapless creature is feeling: fear. At this pronouncement, the victorious troopers holler with savage glee.
This might seem merely a variant of the standard-issue war movie, but Verhoeven the nihilist isn't playing it straight. The film implies that humans started the war, which has been raging for several years over mineral-rich asteroids. Instead of replaying the familiar scenario of righteous heroes fighting against an evil foe (the Nazis, the Imperial storm troopers of Star Wars), Verhoeven lures viewers into identifying with the aggressors.
The controlled-evolution-is-destiny theme gets a slightly different treatment in Alien Resurrection, the latest sequel to the extraordinarily successful Alien. Reilly (Sigourney Weaver) was killed in the previous installment, but now we meet her clone, who is being incubated as a host organism for an alien. The aliens are "Perfect Predators." Caring only about reproducing their own kind and wiping out all other life forms, they take no prisoners, desire no slaves, make no treaties. Naturally, a group of renegade geneticists can't resist the temptation to tame and use these creatures.
The newly cloned Reilly has a funny look in her eye, and she is very calm when she tells the scientists that they'll soon be dead. She's also a killer basketball player who can beat up the boys. It turns out that this lab-produced Reilly has inadvertently swapped a bit of DNA with the alien, who has also picked up a few genetically determined tricks from Reilly. Fortunately for the human race, the new, improved Reilly—assisted by a cyborg—is able to succeed where standard-issue humans have failed. She kills the last remaining alien, who is technically her grandchild, and blends into the vast amorphous gene pool of planet Earth. The scientists have played God, and it has turned out okay. They have enhanced Earth's breeding stock.
In the original Alien, human space travelers stumbled upon dormant eggs in an abandoned spacecraft. As the film developed, it became clear that the aliens were a force bent on the total destruction of all other species; the use of unlimited force was presented as a defensive measure.
In a few short years, scientists have progressed from cloning fruit flies to sheep. Huxley's Brave New World looms on the horizon, and while the science may be inevitable, the ethics have yet to be developed. The fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spaniards coupled maritime technology with raw, brute force to conquer and enslave the New World. Nuclear fission's first application was to incinerate civilian populations, including thousands of Japanese Christians. As genetic manipulation becomes a fact of life, scientists will undoubtedly find redemptive uses for it: screening out inherited diseases, for instance. But the potential for misuse will be incalculable. If this new knowledge is coupled with a belief that societies can manipulate the evolution of the species to a position of unquestioned dominance, the Tower of Babel will seem like a quaint diversion.
Set against such dark visions, Andrew Niccol's film Gattaca is a more cerebral, more life-affirming variation of the themes of biofascist destiny. In a world where the elite class is made up of perfectly engineered genetic wonders, a "faith-birth" renegade, Jerome Morrow (Ethan Hawke), borrows the genetic imprint of another man who has been crippled in an accident. Irene (Uma Thurman) is his foil, a nearly perfect woman who dwells on her one flaw. The visual palette is a cross between Wall Street blue and Reichstag chic; the message is a more upbeat version of Winston Smith's rage against the regime in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
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