Gattaca's entire dramatic architecture rests on a single misunderstanding about power.
The film treats genetic discrimination as a gatekeeper problem—show up with the right DNA, pass the screening, get the job—and Vincent's solution is therefore a performance problem: borrow the right body, hack the system at the checkpoint.
Watch the apartment scenes. Vincent lives in a coffin-sized space that vibrates when the maglev trains pass, buys his genetic material from Jerome on the black market, and faces constant biological maintenance costs that the film never frames as financial precarity.
The film never asks what happens after he walks through the door.
The real Vincent would face something worse than a bad DNA test. He'd face insurance denial the moment his genetic markers appeared anywhere—not just employment screening, but health coverage, life insurance, mortgage qualification—and he couldn't get sick, get old, or sustain the metabolic maintenance his body required without exposing himself. The film gets hiring discrimination prophetically right and then stops looking.
What Gattaca actually demonstrated, without knowing it, is how screening technology doesn't eliminate the underclass—it just outsources their containment to systems that never show up on screen.
Find and read the original 1997 script's deleted scenes or director Andrew Niccol's 2007 interview in American Cinematographer about the apartment design choices—specifically what he intended those spaces to communicate about sustained poverty versus momentary access.
Track down the Criterion Collection essay (if released) or look for Nicholas Rapold's 2012 retrospective in Film Quarterly examining how 1990s biotech sci-fi systematically misread where discrimination would actually calcify—it focuses specifically on Gattaca, In Time, and Never Let Me Go as films that nailed surface barriers while missing structural ones.