I can see why Code 46 might not be on someone’s top 10 list of the year (though given the competition, I’m not sure inclusion’s unwarranted), but why was this film so summarily overlooked when it came out? By critics, by the boxoffice, by art house goers. I guess it fell between two stools - too high concept for mass audiences, too generic for the art house. And, too, I suspect that many potential fans would be put off by its overarching rhetoric of globalization, which parallels a similar global chic marketed by the likes of IBM and every management consultancy out there. But I found the thematics of globalization interesting, in part because they mirrored the film’s tripartate aesthetics: one part big-budget Hollywood sci-fi, one part Hong Kong urban action film, one part European art film. Michael Winterbottom seems to take seriously the effects entailed by globalization (collapse of time-distance and comingling of cultures) without allowing facile utopian or dystopian claims for such changes. Besides, in the globalized future, Orwellian class divide rules. For a premise so obviously spelled out, the leftist critique is subtle and far from facile.
Bonus: seeing Mick Jones do “karaoke” of “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”
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