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Caught this movie again on cable tonight and it reaffirmed my opinion that it really is an exceptionally well-made film. Purely in terms of the cinematography, I loved all the visual metaphors (e.g. the helical staircase our heroic cripple has to painfully climb), the subdued lighting with their almost washed-out colours, the sterile, clinically drab looking sets and especially the very retro looking cars, the appearance of which belies their great speed, far faster than what we have even today in modern cars (another subtle metaphor for the central theme "don't judge a book by its cover" ?) I'm glad they didn't try to stuff the sets with craploads of futuristic looking garbage, that would simply have distracted us from the real cautionary tale in this film, the corruption of society itself.
I found the DNA stuff quite believable. See how far we have come today since Watson and Crick proposed the structure of DNA. We have now sequenced the complete human genome, all 3+ billion base pairs of it, along with the complete sequences of quite a few other organisms. PCR was hailed as a phenomenal breakthrough when it was described by Kary Mullis, for which he received the Nobel Price in 93, now we have improved on the technique with "real time PCR" which makes the old process of reading bands on an electrophoretic gel look antiquated and plodding. Automated DNA sequencers are in routine lab use everyday, churning out thousands of base pairs of code based on modifications of the method designed by Sanger. Genomic arrays ("gene chips") promise to be the next great revolution in biotechnology. Mammalian cloning has been achieved and human cloning seems imminent, if ethical scruples don't put a stop to the attempt.
Given the progress we have seen in such a short time, I believe that the situation portrayed in the movie could well come to pass, perhaps within the next 30 years.
The science part is very satisfying and intriguing, but I did find some things very implausible. If "Big Brother" is so meticulous about cataloguing the entire genotypes of all individuals on a central mainframe where it can be displayed at the click of a button, why is the same apparently not true of some simple phenotypic (physical) attributes ? It would be the easiest thing in the world to capture stuff like eye colour (come on people, Vincent has black eyes and the real Jerome has perfect baby blues), finger prints (which are absolutely unique, even between genetic clones) and even retinal/iridial scans, which I'm sure would have been easy given the technological advances between then and now (this stuff can even be accomplished now). Currently extant technology even permits very precise facial anthropomorphic measurements to be made with lasers that would surely distinguish two individuals (and Vincent and Jerome are easily told apart, even visually). Recording of these simple attributes (which wouldn't really take up much space, given that they're already putting more than 3 billion characters in their database per person) along with the genetic information would allow any imposter to be immediately identified. I found it difficult to believe that the designers of such an oppresively intrusive and obsessively perfect system could have overlooked such an elementary failsafe.
Other than that, the movie was quite intelligent, fairly uplifting and certainly very original. Kudos to Niccol.
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