Mary Reed is a cold, cold woman. Literally.
She’s one of the powered people of Lincoln City—a subset of folks born with superhuman abilities. Mary’s own skills are (again, quite literally) chilling. She can freeze things with a touch. But hers are far from the only powers on display in town. Some “Powereds” can melt metal in their fiery grip; others can move objects with their thoughts; still others can lift incredibly heavy weights or even read people’s minds.
Cool, right? Not in Lincoln City, I’m afraid.
Even though these special citizens essentially built the place, many normal folks never really trusted their abnormal neighbors. So when machines and computers could do the work of the Powereds, the latter became subject to discrimination: They need to have their powers registered by the city. They have difficulty finding jobs. People heckle them, swear at them and do everything they can to make sure these Powereds know their place—and that’s on the city’s bottom rung.
It doesn’t help that their own spinal fluid became the central ingredient for a highly addictive street drug called Psyke. These Powereds, once the turbo-thrust that made Lincoln City go, are now considered the gunk in the engine.
Called criminals so often, perhaps it’s not surprising that some Powereds turn to a life of crime. But most, like Mary, just try to live their lives as best they can. She works as a grocery store, making a meager living and putting up with her manager’s constant scorn.
But Mary’s got another problem, too. Her powers are beginning to eat away at her from the inside: She’s slowly freezing to death.
Connor watches his mom get sicker and sicker, and it makes him sick, too. She’s all Connor has—all he’s ever had. His dad died when he was just a boy, gunned down at a liquor store he was robbing. Now, Connor works odd construction jobs when he can, using his own formidable electric powers to wire houses or install breakers. But the cash Connor and Mary make is barely enough to pay the bills, much less get the expensive medical attention that Mary needs.
Connor needs more money, and he needs it fast. And soon, he realizes that his electric powers may be, you might say, a conduit for a new, dangerous and ever-so-illegal career. Shocking.
Connor and Mary form the movie’s emotional core. Connor clearly loves his mom a lot, and he’d do most anything to see that she’s made well again.
That’s great as far as it goes. But does Connor go too far? Mary sure would (and does) say so. When she discovers that Connor has turned to crime to pay the bills, she’s horrified. She’d literally rather die than see her son corrupted or follow the wrong path. She serves as Connor’s conscience—one that, for much of the movie, he does his best to ignore.
Code 8 comes with a touch of social commentary, with Lincoln City’s Powereds suffering the sort of scorn and abuse that many minorities have historically dealt with. The Canadian film seems especially interested in the plight of undocumented workers, who are forced to labor in menial or off-the-books jobs. In the context of the film itself, you see plenty of people unfairly subjected to prejudice and stereotype and, often, ungrounded fear. By the end of the film, Lincoln City is even taking steps to ban Powereds from the city limits altogether. Obviously, the discrimination we see here isn’t a good thing. But the film is clearly trying to make a point about this destructive social evil.
Connor expresses a belief in the afterlife, suggesting that loved ones who’ve moved on can see him and (he hopes) influence him from beyond the grave.
A slimy Psyke dealer, Marcus Suttcliffe, lays about his lounge-lizard headquarters with a couple of scantily clad women. (We don’t see anything critical, and in fact don’t even see their faces. But one hand that strokes Marcus’ leg looks disturbingly childlike.)
Marcus’ headquarters are located in a strip club he apparently owns. We see one dancer, apparently and indistinctly bare-breasted, at a distance, fending off a customer who touches her rear as she’s performing. One wall of the establishment features a neon sign that’s essentially the outline of a nude woman.
There’s some banter involving the supposed size of a guy’s anatomy. We hear jokes involving sadomasochism and infidelity.
Connor, even as he gets involved in underworld operations, has a serious problem with killing most people. Some of his associates and rivals? Not so much.
Bad guys essentially execute several police officers, shooting them point-blank in the head. Other people are shot and killed, too, often accompanied by little explosions of blood. Some folks bleed out from bullet wounds, often breathing their last in pools of their own blood.
Marcus’ bodyguard, Rhino, has a pretty useful power, considering his gig: Not only is he super strong (a “brawn,” in the lingo of Lincoln City), but he’s bulletproof, too. He’s shot several times in a couple of scenes, and he sometimes plucks bullets out of his own chest, as if they were splinters.
Someone is strangled to death. Another person is skewered in the eye by a metal lance, a slender spike that’s driven deeper into the skull by the means of special powers. Two electrically-powered people have what amounts to a “shock off.” Each tries to shock each other in the chest, with one knocking another down.
Connor meets Nia, a Powered with the unusual ability to heal others. She helps keep Marcus healthy, it seems—pressing her hand against his chest when the guy starts coughing. (We assume that the cough is a sign of a more serious condition.) She heals a nasty cut that Connor received, too, and she even has the ability to erase gunshot wounds. But her healing powers come at great cost to her own health.
Mary’s own terminal illness manifests at first in her hands. Her knuckles and joints bear strange, blue-black wounds, it seems, and she’s constantly running her hands under hot water to warm them up. Gradually, the sickness manifests in her face as well—her veins both running like black rivers underneath her skin and somehow glistening, like glitter, too. The disease causes her to pass out.
A wanted Powered flings fire in the face and body of a police officer. Powerful, automated “robocops” emotionlessly gun down several lawbreakers, but they are forcefully de-commissioned in several ways, too. One has his robotic head partly cleaved by a massive disk. Others have their necks severed or heads crushed. Sometimes, the drones they ride in crash. All these automatons are technically mechanical constructs, but because they’re bipedal and humanoid, the damage they receive can feel more visceral.
We hear that Connor’s father was shot and killed. Someone contemplates slitting someone else’s throat.
About 65 f-words and nearly a dozen s-words. We also hear “a–,” “b–ch,” “b–tard,” “d–n,” “h—” and “d–k.” God’s name is misused a half-dozen times (four of those with “d–n”), and Jesus’ name is abused twice.
As mentioned, the most notorious drug in Lincoln City is something called Psyke—essentially spinal cord fluid harvested from Powereds. We see the milky-white liquid in pouches, as well as witnessing how the stuff is harvested. Near-catatonic people are hooked up via hoses and “milked,” as it were. We see it as part of a news broadcast, and the announcer tells us that there’s still a heated debate over whether these donors should be considered criminals or victims.
Psyke is highly addictive, and Nia is an admitted user—unable to escape Marcus’ influence in part because of the addiction. (We see her take the stuff in the form of droplets to her eyes.) Marcus deals Psyke, but he also works for a shadowy organization called The Trust. Connor falls in with this group of drug dealers and, thus, becomes part of its operation.
People drink various alcoholic beverages, and the bar in Marcus’ strip club features a dizzying array of bottles.
A police officer tries to talk his partner into planting Psyke in a suspect’s house. Perhaps setting itself up for a sequel, Code 8 suggests the Psyke trade will continue to flourish in Lincoln City with the help of at least one character that we’re encouraged to root for.
The backstory behind Code 8 is perhaps more interesting than the movie itself. The flick was the brainchild of its two stars, brothers Robbie and Stephen Amell (the latter of whom starred CW’s Arrow during the show’s eight-season run). They launched an Indiegogo campaign to fund their flick and eventually raised $3.4 million. After a tiny theatrical run in late 2019, Code 8 landed on Netflix on April 11 and—to the surprise of nearly everyone—quickly squirreled its way into Netflix’s most popular offerings, becoming the service’s third most-watched show the week of its release.
Wired says Code 8’s popularity suggests something interesting for the movie industry. It proves that you don’t need to have a $200 million budget to find success: Indie genre movies can find an audience—especially if they’re are driven by stars with a pretty rabid fanbase.
That said, this low-budget sci-fi movie’s popularity on Netflix won’t be augmented by Plugged In’s review of it.
To be sure, there are far worse sci-fi flicks out there, in every way you’d care to define the word worse. But Code 8’s B-movie plot isn’t helped by its wholly unnecessary content. The Amells could’ve easily turned this into a PG-13-level flick had they wanted to—thus opening the story up to younger viewers who might dig Code 8’s premise more. The language is the biggest issue here, all of which could’ve expunged without diminishing the story one iota. Scrubbing the film free of its sparse nudity and sporadic bloodspray could’ve saved some money on a production that was counting every penny.
Code 8 is a watchable, but not a particularly good, movie. Its only lasting contribution may be its ability to further desensitize young viewers (for neither they nor their parents often pay much attention to viewer content advisories on Netflix), potentially priming the pump for more extreme content as they get older.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
