The Shape of Thingies to Come (Code 46 (DVD))

Member Name: theediscerning

Product:	Code 46 (DVD)
Date:	16/10/05 (90 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: It's the future...

Disadvantages: ... and as normal it's not how we want it to be

A charismatic corporate investigator is flown to Shanghai, where a company making medical ID / visa pass thingies are witnessing fatally doled out forgeries among their output. He instantly finds the culprit, but does nothing other than let her off, and fall in love with her...

This sounds like a reasonable scenario for a film that's both small-scale and globetrotting, and that's just what it is. It's very quietly science fiction - in that it's not Alien 6 meets The Matrix. You might enjoy the film without any concerns about its futuristic setting, although it is important, as we can see by dissecting our opening paragraph.

*Charismatic...* Tim Robbins plays the male lead, and as this is the future he has been given a "virus", a computer-assisted mutation almost, where he can read a person's entire mind from an instant's conversation. This makes the investigation just a few short talking-head interviews, but the whole virus idea is important later.

"Shanghai...* The film might as well have been set anywhere, but it seems to be Shanghai. The Bund area (at a guess) provides a spread of skyscrapers that aren't exactly familiar to the usual cinema-goer's eye, so the slow bits and scene-setting shots are novel. In fact, so westernised is the area the huge neon signs are just as you would expect any city to look like - which is partly the point. Also, as this is the future, everyone speaks English, only an English that borrows a few phrases from European languages - 'sorry', 'how are you?', 'can I come in?' - that sort of thing.

*Thingies...* These are important to the film, and also make for very cheap props to produce. While they seem to be made by a few dozen people poring over their printing - this might be the future but this must be too important for robots or something - they are just tiny bits of coloured paper. But boy are they serious business. We see the female lead, played by Samantha Morton, hand a forgery over to a friend of hers in a nightclub. He needed one that would let him go to India, and his medical test for the approved visa thingy never succeeded. Don't worry, they become even more important later on...

*Culprit... fall in love... all the rest...* What the film seems to be, when she takes him out to celebrate both her being let off and her birthday, is just a small case of investigator/policeman falling for the guilty person and not caring too much. But what you should remember throughout this is the film's very title. For before the opening credits we have been told all that Code 46 entails.

In a world of cloning, where clones are subject to so many different factors - environment, climate, food culture, chance - that they are ultimately different people, it is very difficult for anyone to make 100% sure they are not engaged sexually with their own kin. Code 46 enables what is presumably some sort of world government to check all known couples trying for babies, and all females coming by them more accidentally, for anything down to a 25% parental DNA match.

But surely that won't be such a concern for this couple? He's just in town for one job, then is being chauffeured across some city/country border to the airport to fly home to his wife and son. She's a bit of a wacky girl, anyway - with an odd dream about searching for a man on a subway train that she has every birthday...

It's the present now, and time to work out how successful the science fiction in the film is. Well, it's not too far distant, and finger-print ID for one's workplace is very believable (we even see the problems caused by that if you have a finger replaced for some reason...). When you drive down completely empty 8-lane highways into the city, your care is automatically cleansed in a special tunnel. People are awoken by almost invisible flat-screen, touch-screen computers - unless they're corporate investigators, when they use a Minority Report reject screen interface.

It is fair to say however that all this might not appear to add too much to the film, but obviously provides for key plot events. It wouldn't be the film it is without any of the future settings, and at the same time, to repeat, isn't science fiction that would alienate anyone averse to the genre. This might have some bearing on the fact that it's rated more highly by female viewers than male ones, on imdb's tasteometer.

So it's now time to work out how successful the film as a whole is. Well, the leads are well played. This coming from someone who isn't a fan of either of them, particularly, is good praise. Robbins is nicely stuffy but confident when working alongside his virus. He has to relax into what he has with Samantha Morton's character, and as quite a lot of her screen time is spent just focussed on her head, or her dancing badly in a karaoke bar, she is actually fairly likeable. She has a major scene to play later on in the film, one of those circumstances where it would certainly make any actress welcome it as a challenge, and she does very well.

There's really no-one else to note in the film - there's a couple of tiny bit parts whose playing actors and actresses you might have heard of, but the other people that should be mentioned are behind the camera.

First, author Frank Cottrell Boyce. Yes, he - the inventor of the book and the film of the book of Millions, was before that doing adult sci-fi-with-serious-themes-and-a-bit-of-nookie films.

And before that he was adapting The Mayor of Casterbridge for the same director as Code 46, Michael Winterbottom. That film, The Claim, is fabulous. His last film, 9 Songs, is appalling. All of them are entirely different in mood, style and genre.

However there seems to be a connection between many of his films, and it's not only in using FCB to write them (they've actually paired up about six or seven times in all now). In This World tailed some emigrant children halfway across the world from central Asia. 9 Songs followed its male lead down to Antarctica for entirely no reason whatsoever (well, if you believe it - it was filmed off Norway). The film he's shooting as you're reading this is back in the Stans of Asia.

And throughout all this you get to feel that he likes his air miles. This film takes us to India and Arabia, and not for vital reasons either. Yes, the global village is now a technological supermarket, where you need these thingies to get anywhere, but it really seems the globetrotting is to the detriment of the film.

No matter where the film is shot, what is shot is important, and for this one there is too much emptiness, and redundant footage. If you can't create a whole CG cityscape, or otherwise afford acres of empty tarmac to show a soulless, privileged entrance to a city, don't try and get away with a posh car and a bit of Sunday traffic. Don't have a futuristic, hyper-important company employed by thirty people and their desks, made futuristic by the furnishings being white. Much more importantly, try giving your characters a bit more likeability - don't instead point your steadicam at Samantha Morton while she gurns in its general direction, especially as she's not exactly La Gioconda.

If you're creating a world, however successfully redolent of a near future, make what we're seeing worthy of that world, and not just empty nothingness. The crunch scene is certainly dramatic and well done, but the rest as it is falls too far short.

The lack of punch in the film can be symbolised by the low-tech thingies, which are actually called "papals", which only sounds like a reference to a certain auction site. Instead of marching robots and doom-mongering global governments, we have paper cards as evidence of the control of our future lives. The fact that everyone talks of the "cover" they bring as visa-type thingies does not lead to dramatic terms of phrase in the dialogue, it just suggests there are even more insurance salesmen around in a few years from now.

Too many times in watching this film the finger was on the 2x button on the remote. And when it's a package with the film *and nothing else at all whatsoever* on the rental disc (no trailers, commentary, not even any obscure chapter titles) it's a bit much. Woe betide anyone who paid in full for this. It's only ninety minutes, and while it might have a lot going for it on paper - a British attempt at serious sci-fi, with well known leads, and global setting - on disc it's poor.

So this future is presently in the past. It won't be watched again, and won't be recommended in the ratings below.

Summary: An empty disc, an empty future, an empty recommendation box.