Movie Review: Equilibrium

So this film was on TV last night, and I figured I'd review it.

Set in a dystopian (near) future after WWIII, mankind has successfully eliminated all war, murder and other unpleasant elements of human nature. This is done by making everyone in society take a daily dose of a psychoactive drug named Prozium. Prozium apparently suppresses all emotion in those who take it.

Everything is watched over by an omnipresent Big Brother style figure named Father. The film borrows heavily from 1984 in it's style and ideas.

In combination with this drugging on a huge scale, all materials that may provoke an emotional reaction (art, music, literature and so on) are rated "EC-10" for emotional content. Anyone in possession of such contraband is summarily executed or arrested for interrogation (after which execution always seems to follow anyway).

These laws are enforced by "Clerics", highly trained agents who practice "gun kata" and use their deadly talents on "Sense Offenders" without hesitation.

Now, let me get one thing straight here: gun kata is one of the biggest flaws of the film. It's basically an excuse for some absolutely ridiculous action sequences. Action directors do not seem to understand that sometimes the occasional bit of shooting that makes sense is far more exciting than completely ludicrous gunfights that are physically impossible.

The principle of this fighting style seems to be ripped from the Matrix - "gun fu" in other words. We get a brief explanation from one character that the style trains a fighter that every possible angle at which he can shoot at and be shot at from is statistically predictable.

Hence a master of "gun kata" can supposedly land many shots on targets all around him without aiming simply by analysing where the most likely placements of enemies are. He can also dodge incoming fire using the same principle.

Quite how you can possibly calculate the exact probability of getting shot from a certain angle in a 360 degree 3d arc in the microsecond before someone can pull the trigger is never explained. Perhaps all Clerics actually have quantum supercomputers for brains and can see into the future too? :\

Clerics also seem incapable of fighting less than 6+ opponents at once. I have no idea how "predicting" bullet trajectories will do you any good when fighting 6 people with machineguns at point blank range, but apparently in this film such logic is irrelevant.

Anyway, this totally inadequate "explanation" basically means that the director can stage preposterous scenes like the one which opens the film.

Christian Bale plays John Preston, an elite Cleric. He walks into a building held by Sense Offenders, switches the lights out, and walks into a room full of them. He then simply stands in the middle of the darkened room staring straight ahead and begins gunning down everyone without even being able to see where they are. With pistols.

Despite the fact he is not even moving and his gun illuminates him clearly standing in the middle of the room all return fire (from machineguns nonetheless) misses him. It truly is an absolutely dumb scene, clearly meant to appeal to the "Whoaaa, duddddeee!" crowd.

Pretty much every action sequence in the film is the same bullshit, and there are around 4-5 such scenes. The only one that was remotely interesting was when he beats up a bunch of guys with his pistols and even that was totally over the top.

Anyway, Preston finishes up there and burns the original Mona Lisa, which was what the rebels were guarding. He catches his partner Cleric (Sean Bean) apparently skipping his drugging and sneaking poetry away to read. The interaction between them early on in the film is one of the better scenes by far.

From then on Preston himself manages to accidentally deprive himself of his dosage and feels emotion for the first time. The film proceeds to get quite interesting, but at every point I started getting intrigued one of the above stupid action scenes had to crash in with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

Ultimately, the biggest failure in the plot in general is the unfeasability of the regime. There are several huge gulfs in logic: Preston is revealed early on to have allowed his wife to be arrested and killed for "Sense Offence".

Later in the film, he is accused of having "relations with a female". Wait, wut? So apparently you can have a wife, you just mustn't show emotion towards her? How does that work? How do you ever get married without having love in the first place?

Surely either everyone should be single, or the state should marry people on convenience in an emotionless society? And how about the kids he has? Why did he ever have a desire to have kids (or even to have sex) if he had no emotion?

Similarly, Preston's enemies (aside from one in particular) are all doped up, but still occasionally display anger, surprise, alarm and smugness...which suggests Prozium isn't exactly doing it's job properly, or the direction and scriptwriting is schizophrenic. I think probably the latter.

And if books and art are outlawed, how do you educate people? To free humanity completely from emotion, you'd have to deprive them of their jobs and education too. These issues are not tackled.

Overall I wanted to like the film, I really did, but the completely over the top action (which is curiously dull most of the time) is a bad habit that is hard to ignore. The indecision of the script on what it wants to be (pure action, thriller or musing on society) muddles everything and by the end no ideological statement seems to be made beyond "isn't a world like this shitty?"

Final Word:

It's a passable film and I think I'd watch it again if it was on. Ultimately though it isn't bold enough to drop the Matrix rip-off crap and as such it feels a bit like it sold its soul for cheap action scenes.

The film also meanders along ploddingly at times. It lacks that "oomph" needed to really make a movie watchable.

2.5/5


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