To me, the story is about individual struggle. Even if his behaviour is selfish, his life is richer than if he accepted the imposed limitations by others (imagine how boring that story would be, why is that).

In a way, he is following nature‘s rules (survival of the fittest), instead of the arbitrary deterministic society rules he lives in.

Ultimately, if we only cared about the good of the planet, we would probably choose to cease to exist. Up to a point, everyone alive is a bit selfish.

no he isn't, he is merely exploiting the compassion of the society of the fittest that allows the less fit/ gifted /engineered to live / work near them.

Vincent uses criminal connections to pull the entire scheme off (the german), just like a bank heist in a film it feels fun for reasons that don't work without a movie's magic 'genre' control of tone/sympathy/agency etc.

similar to other problems we have today where 'compassion' politics actually harms the fittest members most

An old homeless loony stabbing a brilliant healthy young person today isn't a show of the former's fitness, it's because (their are other incentives for the) the fittest of society choose to not wipe out/exile/enslave the unfit for various reasons (inextricable from the society itself)

Gattaca in the opening even says it's only because he was born in the 'early stages' of the transition

Actual 'meritocracy' safety and other values require ruthlessness and violence, which we already have as all states do, just distrubuted in one configuration (gattaca) versus another configuration (chaotic US today, versus say the safety of singapore, or dictatorship of north korea, or some other gattaca where the Vincents aren't born at all because fertility is managed)

A society can distribute it's coercion/violence in different ways, vincent is just a defector in a trust game.

Always reminds me of that lame Feynman negging woman at a bar thing, how is defecting on social norms clever? that's literally the point of lying/cheating/stealing/littering etc, one individual wins at the harm of the environment / culture. Once a few men are rude / cads, reputation of the place declines and fewer girls show up, or only certain types and not others, etc.

'we live in a society'

If they are the fittest, how come he can actually do it? If he can "win", that is fit enough for nature, moral questions aside.

If we had a whole system saying that people with 11 toes always run faster, and a person with 10 toes wins once, that system was based on false premises, taken as objective truth without proof.

Now, if we have a system that claims people with 11 toes usually/on average run faster, why not allow the diversity of runners with 10 toes?

elites 'let you win' some games for all sorts of ulterior motives, implicit or unconscious even.

Vincent barely wins for a small time, he almost collapses on the treadmill lmao

My point is they left the exclusion / ruthlessness dial at level 7 when they could choose to crank it to 9

Vincent takes advantage of that temporarily, next guy and group will be punished for it.

But he survived. He survived far longer than calculated. Isn't this direct evidence that his genetically determined heart condition was successfully counteracted by a non-genetically identified trait?

And his perfection and determination when designing the mission plan was flawless. Presumably far flawless than the "valids" he was working with, despite having an inferior genome, or the director would never have commented on it. His attitude dramatically improved the odds of mission success.

You seem to be arguing that if a metric says "don't do it", that this metric should be obeyed, even in light of evidence that it is wrong. Had the metric about his heart condition been correct, he never would have made it onto the flight.