Incestuous Cloning: Code 46

Code 46 (directed by Michael Winterbottom) is a science fiction romance.

This movie is really, really weird.

Tim Robbins is an insurance fraud investigator in the future. He goes to a company in Shanghai where some employee has been stealing "papeles" used to allow people to navigate between the tightly guarded cities and the outskirts. Samantha Morton is the one stealing the papers. He knows it's her via an "empathy virus" he uses to read people, but he's so captivated by her that he says a different person was the thief. This begins a love affair that gets Robbins in some hot water with his company and with the only-alluded-to government - hot water they must work together to get out of.

It might sound like a thriller but it's much more a romance. Nobody's really chasing them exactly. It's unclear if they're ever in danger. Thanks to countless science fiction movies that take place in authoritarian futures, we can easily assume the worst and Code 46 can focus on the loving and losing.

That's where things get weird. There's no chemistry whatsoever in the movie. Samantha Morton and Tim Robbins don't look like they should be together and they don't act like they should be together. If they were, say, Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johannsson, we could just take it for granted that they were in love. But these two have to work for it. Every intimate scene made me feel physically uncomfortable, not just because they're not sci-fi-attractive but because their characters were boring and seemed to have no real place together onscreen. Anonymous drones might have been okay, but these people weren't exactly like everyone else either. They were just average.

The visual continuity had the same problem. Every outdoor scene basically looked the same as now and the indoor scenes either looked like Gattaca or a struggling designer's Tokyo apartment. A scene in an all white cube of an office building with Minority Report screens everywhere would be followed by a drive on highway 99 between Bakersfield and LA. No continuity, which means no real absorption into the invented world - something that science fiction movies usually covet.

If you don't believe the world and don't care about the characters, what's supposed to carry you through the film? The music was the closest thing to doing this. It was okay, ambient, not unnteresting. Until the closing scene where, yes you guessed it, Coldplay ushers us back to "reality".



2 stars
Similar to: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Fountain, Gattaca