I walked into the movie thinking that it would be about some guy who
contracted a virus that gives him ESP, and he uses his powers to
root out high-level corruption, fortuitously stumbling on a high-
ranking official that facilitates immigration fraud. Throw in some
references to super-science, and a One World government that has
found it convenient to super-manage population dynamics by preventing
inbreeding, the movie is bound to be worth a good looking into.
For a movie set 20 or 30 years in the future, you'd expect the whole
movie to have been shot indoors. But the movie opens with credits
that indicate it got BBC funding, so what would you expect but poor
yellow lighting and flimsy cardboard sets? Well, you couldn't be
more wrong! The movie opens with bright daytime shots of vast desert
areas invaded by progress; roads interconnect with each other, more
like the lines in a cobweb than a symmetrical, mathematically laid
out spiderweb. Progress has its places even in the Third World,
not just in airports in Japan or Hong Kong, where a lot of footage
seems to have been shot. But in a future some 20 to 30 years from
now, civilization can be seen to run from desert outpost to desert
outpost, punctuated by oil refineries and the like, where water is
probably a whole lot more precious than oil, I guess. Anyway, this
is actual footage shot from a few thousand feet up, maybe flying
over Saudi Arabia, or India, or Japan.
When we are in some big cities in the Far East - the night shots
are the most memorable parts here - everything consists of brightly
lit skyscrapers, nothing too futuristic but you can tell a lot of
money and bureaucratic administration goes behind these spotlight-lit,
backlit-rooftop, skyscraper structures. Is behemoth government
spending and controlling something that weighs these buildings down,
or props them back up? You decide.
In a world whose population is no longer decimated by war, the signs
of progress are smooth, well-engineered, curving freeways running
through desert expanses in the Third World, and through mega-metra-
politan urban centers in the First or Second World. But for what
it is worth, these are gorgeous daytime shots of desert areas that
display their development from thousands of feet up in the most
practical and shameless manner possible, towering skyscrapers sticking
up out of the desert, and entire communities snug-to-the-rug next to
the skyscrapers, and then some. The movie breathes in an out with a
fresh air of real world authenticity, they sure didn't use any mocked
up miniatures in this movie. (Still, for all of this real life
footage, it makes a person wonder what got built first, and whether
government control of zoning concepts led to the bulldozing of the
shanty towns that ought to have existed first; government tends to
rear its ugly head even out in the desert, all in the name of progress.)
Which is not to say there aren't any shanty towns any more. There
are still some outlying areas that don't shake hands with the
administrative give and take behind Code 46 regulations. In some
remote, desolate, impoverished areas of the world there is still
some kind of libertarian paradise where people live in squalor
and poverty, unconcerned with the various information highways
that hold the government-regulated, civilized world together.
You'll visit these areas in the latter parts of the movie.
The hero of the movie is this guy who has been treated with a virus
that immerses his brain in some kind of bath of chemicals that enhances
his mind with 'empathy' (yes, they mean 'esp' here, I think). By
leaning forward and verbally jogging someone's memory, he can dig into
their minds and root around for the information he feels like
extracting. It's not just guessing when a person is lying or being
truthful, but given half a chance he can fish out pieces of information
like passwords (called 'palabros' in the movie). Great parlor trick
or icebreaker, but having later on, it's not as dispositive a talent
as he thought it would be. Apparently there are defenses to ESP or
"empathy" and there actually ARE some honest people out there who
don't have anything to hide, and can't be talked into doing drugs.
Anyway, as the movie goes, it seems that our hero the government
inspector has been sent to figure out who is forging these "papelles"
(accented the French way, with stress on the second syllable) and
facilitating some kind of immigration fraud of sorts.
Now for a word about the dialog in the movie. This is a transnational
world ruled by a government consortium of sorts, like in the original
James Caan 'Rollerball' movie but without all of the action. You see
a lot of Spanish, Japanese, Chinese expressions, it makes a person think
he is almost trapped in an issue of "Quinto Lingo" from the 1970s (that
was a magazine that had five different languages (all European) running
down the sides of each page, exploring parallelisms in grammatical
structure, syntax, and vocabulary). If the movie is only 30 or 40 years
in the future, will the natural languages of the earth really mish-
mash as comfortably as is depicted here? I doubt it, but most of us
watching the movie will have no trouble understanding the stock
phrases employed here - - - stuff like 'los siento' (sorry) and
'palabro' (password) and 'papelle' (passport) and a few Chinese-
Japanicisms that I couldn't figure out how to spell.
Ok, this is how the 'empathy' talent works. He leans forward to the
airport security girl, or the ticket girl, or whoever, and he leans
forward and explains that he has to "write a report" when he gets back,
can she please say something about herself to make his job easier?
After all, he's a big, important government investigator in a world
where there isn't any war anymore, or terrorism, or smuggling (?) to
speak of, what everybody is worried about, is inbreeding and the
government has - through fiat - decided that outbreeding is a big plus -
it's not like we can have clones walking the streets all over the place,
or superhuman "racehorse" quality superbreeds washing the inferior
people out of the gene pool, can we? Jurisdictional questions aside,
apparently all the governments on earth have jumped on board and decided
to take this horse for a ride.
Anyway, by insinuating his way into this conversation or that, casually
enough, he probes their minds for pertinent facts, or even impertinent
ones.
Although - as I said above - the movie opens with some aerial shots of
deserts turned into rich, productive supercities with hardly a yard's
difference between loose sand and bumper to bumper hubbub, you'd think
that the movie would confine itself to indoor shoots for the whole rest
of the movie. But the movie actually kind of alternates between outdoor
day shoots, indoor day shoots, a couple of nightclub night shoots, and
all of this makes for a highly pleasing sequence of visual stimuli.
When is an insurance company something darn close to a 'government'
body? When the trappings and manifestations of its arbitrary power
run roughshod over arbitrary geographic boundaries, that's when.
Although an 'insurance' company is the nominal employer of our hero
(played by Tom Robbins), it is clear that this 'insurance' company
is one that has been invested with all the necessary power and then
some to prosecute crimes, and it thinks nothing of employing gentle
mental intrusions to probe the memory frameworks of the employees who
are its prime suspects. Heard of the Fifth Amendment? Not in this
distant future world! Just getting this part of the movie straight
probably warrants another two or three viewings!
Our hero the insurance investigator has to report to his own insurance/
government superior (by miniaturized videophone on a cellphone), so
he is hardly the steppenwolf that other movie reviewers might want to
portray him as. He knows his place, he knows his duty, and he knows
why he is sent hopscotching around the world to find people that have
violated "Code 46" - an ordinance of this super-government consortium
that forbids inbreeding, and sets up a variety of punishments and
remedies for any dalliance that might give rise to an excessive
concentration of genes in the foetus that is too similar to the parents.
Most remedies involve something significantly more than abortion, they
also mandate selective memory erasure, a more or less kind of brain-
washing intended to make the parents forget about having met each
other, or at the least find each other repulsive.
Anyway, our hero stumbles on the person facilitating all of these
passport (ahem, 'papelle') infractions, finds her far too beautiful
to bust, and perpetrates a magnificent breach of duty to protect
her. He's maybe 45 years old, she's maybe 25.
He doesn't find out until much later that she shares so many of his
own genes that she could be the equivalent of his own mother, who
was one of many clones herself.
I think that Samantha Morton (wow! what a beautiful accent!) is the
actress who plays this airport security lady that gets 'knocked up'
the very first time she has sex with our hero. She's more than just
window dressing in this movie, she has just as many lines of dialog
that our hero does, and plays an individual who is both practical
and plans for the future, and has a life of her own. But she finds
herself knocked up, and so she goes and has the required genetics
examination as is expected of her, and then - on discovering that
she is going to be giving birth to a baby that is practically 75%
identical to herself, goes through with a government mandated abortion
and brainwashing.
The brainwashing part of this movie is similar to that of the
Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, but instead of using electrodes
to zero in on the sets of synapses for a given collection of memories,
the same result is achieved by, I guess, receiving "virus" pills that
Do The Trick. Much in the same way that 'empathy' pills give the
recipient mind-reading powers, or esp. (If you liked Eternal Sunshine
of a Spotless Mind, Code 46 belongs to the same genre of films dealing
with knowledge and truth and memory.)
If you aren't a little bit shocked at the widespread use of abortion
to manage population dynamics in the future, then maybe you read more
science fiction than I do. I found the idea shocking, myself.
After she gets her abortion, she is made to forget about him, and I
think she is required to take a pill laced with a 'revulsion' virus
to make it that much less likely she will ever fool around with him
again.
However, our hero the insurance (government) inspector finds it
necessary to go all the way around the world to meet up with her again,
only to discover she can't remember him any more... She has no idea
who he is. He finds out that she has already had her abortion, but
he still wants to rekindle his relationship with her, and if he can,
somehow revive her memories of him. If he wants to make her 'full'
again, this says more about his own feelings of individual shallowness
than her own feelings of emptiness.
Maybe the sense of emptiness is a genetic trait of his? Anyway,
he is so smitten with her that he wants to conceive a kid with her
again, and maybe maintain it, even if that means losing his own wife
who is back state-side, and doesn't know that her husband cheated on
her). So, as you can see, this movie is rich on all kinds of levels.
Abortion, adultery, loneliness, belonging, duty, and government
oppression. To make matters more interesting, this is not just
about a movie where a man wants to raise up a baby almost identical
to himself, but it is about a selfish man who already has a kid
waiting for him back home. So, in that respect, it is also about
personal greed, and an understated (yet actually overblown) sense of
self-importance.
The movie would be lost without the soundtrack that goes with it,
as it is moving and exciting in all the right places, unobtrusive
where it's most appropriate to be that way. In fact, the composer
demonstrates his familiarity with a variety of music styles depending
on time, place, and situation. When I sat in the theater, several
people in the audience laughed at the Karaoke sequence, which was
a convenient place to break up the dark and somber mood, and send
the audience in a direction different than we realized we were moving,
but did anybody really pay attention to the lyrics here?
It's a movie that's well worth watching. If I had to make a complaint,
maybe it's the shortage on funds that kept the movie down to one or
two car chases. At least BBC came to the rescue and saved this movie
at the very last second. In any case, a carefully shot, extensive car
chase could have added so much more to this movie, especially if they
had to run through a part of the world still at war. Also, some of
the 'extras' could have been encouraged to deliver their own lines
simultaneously in the background in a few places so more viewers would
be motivated to see the movie twice several times over to see what the
other people were talking about.
Script or Dialog B+
Direction B
Photography A+
Sets & Locations A+
Music & Sound A-
Plot B
Car Chases D
Shooting/Explosions F
========== X-RAMR-ID: 38547 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 1314646 X-RT-TitleID: 1134465 X-RT-AuthorID: 10937
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