Code 46

Released: 2003
Drama, Sci-fi, Romance
Director: Michael Winterbottom
Starring: Tim Robbins, Samantha Morton
Running Time: 93 minutes
Rated: R

The breakdown:  In a futuristic society, you cannot fall in love with someone who has the same nuclear DNA as you.  In other words, there has been so much genetic manipulation in the past, the mating of our species has to be "monitored" and approved before you're allowed to be with the person you're in love with.  Code 46 is a situation where two people are having sex or intend to have sex and possible create a severely disabled child due to genes being too close together like if two family members (brother/sister, father/daughter, mother/son) had created a child.  If the couple is unaware of their genetic match, they are not criminals, but have some sort of "medical" intervention.  If they are aware of the match, it becomes criminal and a Code 46 violation.


Whewwww, this plot was really muddled and hard to follow.  I had to rewatch the beginning after the ending, and rewatch the ending for clarification.

The acting was fine.  The script was fine.  The cinematography was (bleak and dark visually) but still fine.  The weakest link of the film was the plot itself.  It felt as though the story was not yet fully formed before they starting filming and just tried to make it up as they went.  This is not a case where the movie is smarter than the general public, or that the plot was complicated and most people just don't get it and give up trying.  This was just an underdeveloped plot.  I'll try to do a synopsis.

Tim Robbins plays this investigator who's married with a child and travels to Shanghai to investigate a forgery.  In this future, cities are inaccessible without a form of clearance, issued by the government.  Anytime you want to travel anywhere you need government permission first.
The forgery is happening where the permission papers are created and sent out.
He finds the girl he is looking for by using a self inflicted "virus" that makes him able to read minds in a way.  He needs to be told one thing about the person by the person themselves.  After talking to everyone on the staff he finds her, but something makes him point out someone else as the criminal, letting her go free.  He runs into her later that day and has sex with her.  He has fallen in love with her within one days time, but has to go back home, as his clearance was only for 24 hours.
So when he's back home, he finds out that someone has illegally traveled to another place and died while visiting there.  The clearance for that person's travel was issued by the same government office that he just investigated.  His boss is unhappy and sends him back saying he didn't complete his initial investigation.  No one should be traveling now with falsified documents if he had caught the right person.
Upon arriving again, he finds out that the girl he slept with is now at a clinic getting some sort of operation.  He does his mind reading trick to find out why she's there and what they have done to her.  They've also partially erased her memory of the recent past.

Anyway, this plot is hard to talk about without giving everything away, so I've taken you through about the first half hour of the movie.  After that I'm just spoiling it for you, but it's still not worth it to watch the film.

In this future, there's something called the "outside" that looks like all barren desert outside the cities where it seems like lots of normal healthy people are living.  The reason they are not allowed inside the cities is not revealed until the end.  In this future, everyone speaks a mix of Spanish, English, French, Chinese and English no matter where you are in the world.  If you're not on top of your basic words in foreign languages, you might need a little translations here and there.  Otherwise, the languages are not the problem. 

I suppose if you have never heard of this movie, or you NEVER want to see it.  I will speak briefly of the ending and the most important questions the movie is proposing.  If you want to see it, you should stop reading right now.


So the main questions of the movie are:
1.) Should we, as a human race, keep playing God and split this gene or do in vitro fertilization, or even think about cloning people? 
In the case of the movie plot, all those things we're playing with come with a great cost to the future of innocent people who may fall in love with each other; but having a child could cause a lot of birth defects because genes are too close together or an identical match.
In the case of this movie, the man falls in love with the 100% genetic match of his mothers genes.  THIS DOES NOT MEAN he's having an affair with his mother.  This movie is not about incest.  In a scene they explain that his mother was cloned and out in the world there were 25 identical DNA matches of her genetic code.  They cloned that DNA 25 times and the babies are different due to things like environment, education, etc.  So, just by chance, he falls for someone who's a clone of his mother's DNA, but not his actual mother.  He never knew his genetic parents as he was an in vitro baby who had a set of parents raising him that were essentially adopting him as an embryo.

2.)  Is it better to have loved and lost then never to have loved at all?
This situation is determined by erasing memories in this movie.
In the end for Tim Robbins character, they remove all memories of the girl he truly loved and he goes back to his wife and kid, not ever having any memory of his affair, the passion, the conversations, the feelings, or the woman herself.  So is he better off not remembering true love and just being happy with what he thinks is true happiness?
In the end, for Samantha Mortons character they kick her out of her job and send her to live "outside" where life is a day to day struggle without anyone to care for her, no love, no food, no shelter, and you are completely on your own, never allowed into a city again.  The government completely forgets about people out there and you matter to no one.
But they have left her with her memories intact.  She remembers the affair, the passion, the true love that she can longer be with.  And even if she could somehow get to him, he doesn't remember her at all.  So is it better to have the memory of how happy you were with someone even if you can't be with them anymore?

Who's better off in this situation?  Who is happier?

I understand the situation and the questions, but the movie still feels underdeveloped to me.  Overall, I didn't really like it, and I'm pretty sure in a year I won't remember it at all.
Sometimes the actors were speaking so quietly or mumbling, I couldn't understand what was being said and that automatically takes you out of the movie.
I did enjoy the slow pace of the sexual tension between the two characters, but at the same time, it felt like a slow moving, difficult to keep interest in movie.

It reminded me a lot of Gattaca from 1997, except for the fact that Gattaca is one of my favorite movies because you care about the characters motivations and invest yourself in their lives.  I get lost in that movie, meanwhile, Code 46 might make you feel lost sometimes.  Big difference.

I give it a 2 out of 5 for solid acting from actors that I do think are talented, but the plot should've been reviewed and streamlined before filming began.
For a snapshot of the success of the director getting his viewpoint across - it's estimated this film cost 7.5 million dollars to produce and world wide it grossed almost $200,000 total.