Review of the DVD - rating * * * *

Review of the film - rating: * * *

And sits happily is does. This is another great transfer from Sony, rendering Niccol's strangely yellow hued exteriors and gleaming interiors with finesse. The sound is convincing and detailed, with a couple of 5 channel showcases, most notably a sequence where a contact lens-less Hawke has to cross a busy road - cars whizz by on front and back soundstages to impressive effect. Incidentally, Michael Nymen's score is breathtaking - oh for a music only soundtrack. At least there is the closing credits to be taped...

The deleted scenes are the predictable mixed bag (quality poor, as you'd expect by the way). Some are filler, while others shed light of either more of the plot or the world in which the characters inhabit. But best of the bunch is a coda, which puts the movie into a contemporary context rather well - this one is definitely worth a spin, as is the lone comedy out-take.

The featurette won't surprise you, while the photo gallery gives us a glimpse of the film's original title on a clapperboard - "The Eighth Day", apparently named after the centre where parents order their children. The poster gallery is a bit of a letdown, numbering only 3.

This is a film crying out for a commentary, but what we have here is nevertheless very good. It sites in their new case format, the highly breakable Super Jewel case - a retrograde step if ever there was one. That said, the implementation is better than Polygram's with nice artwork hiding behind the disc itself. Overall, congratulations to Columbia on getting their region 2 discs as good as this, at last.

You certainly couldn't get to be an astronaut, for example, and Ethan Hawke works as a cleaner at Gattaca, a space acadmey, while dreaming of the stars. Desparate, he calls in a Jimmy Saville style character to fix it for him - Saville presents him with Jude Law, a "valid" swimmer in a wheelchair following an accident. With a bit of jiggery pookery and a lot of planning, Hawke nicks his DNA, becomes Law, and he's whizzing through the space academy faster than you can say "but there's trouble ahead". But there's trouble ahead, following a murder at the space corps, and the authroities find evidence of an invalid on board.

All of which are intriguing ideas, yet the end reult is strangely unsatisfying. The whole thing seems to have been filmed in the seventies, with gleaming hermetically sealed sets and soulless characters. This points at the main weakness - the inherant tediousness of the people we are supposed to care about. Thurman resembles nothing more than an android, so sparks do not exactly fly between her and Hawke.

It also suffers from an insipid sub-Blade Runner voice-over throughout, and an unimaginatively structured script which gets contrived before it gets cliched, then pulls a ridiculous white rabbit out of the hat. Yet it is not without its strengths, and the murder enquiry rasies events towards the dramatic from time to time, helped by Loren Dean - so good in a bit part of Apollo 13 - as the chief investigator.

Compared to the standard shoot-em-up fare, this should be a thinking person's bit of sci-fi. The end result isn't terrible, but suggests that Andrew Niccol didn't have to think all that hard himself. Coming from him the writer of The Truman Show, this is a major disappointment.