Code 46

Provocative, quietly erotic, deeply romantic, and slyly witty (a cameo by a giant of punk rock is funny at first sight, and funnier still when you figure out the joke it's making), Code 46 is a very effective antidote to summer blockbuster bloat.

Updates a classic premise -- the struggle for personal freedom -- by pairing it with ethical and moral quandaries.

It all contributes to a vision of the future that is as haunting as it is dispiriting.

Late in the day, Code 46 bursts its chemical chains to become a convincingly irrational love story.

What this dystopia doesn't do is shock. In truth, Code 46 traffics in notions of speculative social fiction that are so familiar by now as to feel disconcertingly normal.

What doesn't spark is the love story. Morton still seems soggy from her "Minority Report" role as a drenched pre-cog. Who wants romance in a future where glum is the word?

Michael Winterbottom's Code 46 commits a Code 1 violation: It's boring.

Entertaining, thought provoking and has a truly beautiful score. OK not really a masterpiece but a film I could recommend to people who like hard science fiction and are sick of the Avatars, and Star wars which have been polluting the Science Fictilon Genre with pure stupidity and Flashing, bright lights.

This is a film with sparse dialog and hardly any plot points and really very little to offer other than video clips of a modern metropolis which may be identical to Shanghai and vast stretches of desert which serve well as a metaphor for the bleak character of the film. I mean, I was twenty minutes into the film and still wondering what the film was about and now that I've seen the whole thing I'm wondering why anyone saw a need to put this on film. Maybe it's a love story. I have a problem with love stories that do little or nothing to persuade me that the two characters on the screen see something really fascinating in each other and that's why it isn't just another one-night stand when they jump into bed and have what amounts to a one-night stand. If it's supposed to be a cautionary tale about a dystopian future then it needs to work a lot harder than merely suggesting an "eerily possible near-future where cities are heavily controlled and only accessible through checkpoints." I mean, how do you fly anywhere on the planet without going through checkpoints? Gee, whiz. And by the way China instituted its "One-Child Policy" 25 years before this film was released and that made it mandatory for women to be fitted with an IUD after one child and to be sterilized after two, and violators of the policy were subjected to forced abortions and heavy fines. So if you want to talk about oppressive governments you don't have to look any further than yesterday. Not a film I'd recommend unless sitting around for hours on end listening to the rain is your kind of thing.

It's set in the very near future. That's just as well because the budget of this film clearly could not stretch to anything beyond a few small interior sets. Although the very near future looks very similar to today, for out protagonists the usual dystopian restrictions apply. The back of the DVD describes it as a 'companion peice' to such films as Gattaca, Minority Report etc. For Gattaca, another very low budget sci-fi the comparison is *not* flattering. I guess the distributor is admitting it's not very good, but if you collecting the full set of dystopian movies, this needs to be filed on your shelf. Not terribly thought-provoking, not at all erotic, disappointing all round