I watched this 'movie' on a Saturday evening when nothing else was on, and I was pleasantly surprised with the quality. The script is good, the characters develop well, the complexity of the story starts moves along at a nice pace without rushing ... and then suddenly with absolutely no warning it just stops!

This was clearly made, and made well, as either a TV series pilot or as the first in a TV movie series (think Jesse Stone in a slightly sci-fi futuristic Canadian wilderness). But not having that warning going in left me hugely disappointed at the total lack of a conclusion. Obviously this wasn't picked up for some reason, but then it makes no real sense to have released it in its incomplete format.

SURVIVAL CODE was a TV movie originally conceived as a pilot episode of a new show, BOREALIS. The show was never picked up so the viewer is left with this oddly lightweight film that takes a great deal of time setting up various characters in a specific location and then just randomly ends having only cleared up one or two sub-plots. It's an unsatisfying viewing experience, one which made me wonder why I'd bothered when it came to an end.

This low budget effort is a Canadian movie set in the icy Canadian wastes. The story is about various factions fighting over land rights. Although it is set in the future, the science fiction aspects of the story are kept to a bare minimum, no doubt due to budgetary restraints. The characterisation is okay even though the movie lacks big name or even recognisable stars. Bizarrely, some random scenes of cage fighting have been inserted into the mix in order to 'up' the action quotient. It's not an entirely successful choice.

I don't know the full story to this production, and IMDb doesn't pay me enough per review to do a forensic investigation of each title. (Actually, they don't pay me anything per review, but who's counting?) However, based on the provenance of the players (Director mainly does TV work, the star Olsson mainly TV, etc etc) I am going to go out on a limb and say this was intended as a pilot. Not bad. Not bad at all. The Canuck Sci-Fi machine has produced some amazing stuff in the last few years (Eureka remains my fave) and there are some great ideas here with solid execution. Essentially, a sort of futuristic deep-cold LONGMIRE (see my review of the same name). Olsson is astonishing. Somewhere there is a casting director in Hollywood who will notice this and, in my view, great things lie ahead for him. Some uneven performances, notably Karan Oberoi as a Dudley Dooright sort of local cop. The script does not give Oberoi much to work with, the costume dept. gave him a uniform that is always too clean and too pressed for the story, and generally all his scenes tend to break the flow of the production. Nice to see Jon Slan, one of the godfathers of Canadian film, in the hopper. This "film" was nominated for a bunch of Canuck awards, and won a few, There are worse ways to spend a rainy afternoon.