Movie Review: Equilibrium
Posted on 23 April 2008 by Ashleigh Holmes
It is my opinion that every movie lover has several films which they champion. In the course of a conversation with said movie lover, something will remind them of one of those films, and they’ll be bursting with the opportunity to tell you just how great their “all-time favorite film” is. NOTE: They have, at the very least, 200 “all-time favorite films.”
Equilibrium is one of my favorite films to champion. Since I saw it in 2002 or 2003, I can’t even begin to count the number of people to whom I’ve recommended it. It’s like The Matrix meets A Brave New World and 1984 but a million times better.
Christian Bale, pre-America’s next big British import, plays John Preston, an extraordinary Tetragrammaton Cleric, which is fancy, future speak for a cop. But the Tetragrammaton doesn’t protect and serve in the way a 21st century police officer protects and serves. Preston’s job is to seek out sense-offenders and destroy them and their sense-offense articles. Think the Thought Police and Thought Crime from George Orwell’s 1984.
Instead of Big Brother, there’s Father, and Father explains in the beginning of the film how humans discovered that emotional highs, especially when manifested in anger, would be the downfall of civilization. Enter the sense-suppressing drug, Prozium. Each inhabitant of Libria, the Utopian city-state where the film takes place, is required to take their daily intervals of Prozium, which effectively makes one a “living” Zombie.
Of course, there are citizens who refuse to take their intervals and are part of an underground movement to subvert Father and the Tetragrammaton and bring feeling, color, art, music, poetry and any other emotion-evoking device back into life. Through a complete accident, Preston becomes one of these sense-offenders and the main tool of the underground.
The film isn’t as action-packed as The Matrix, but the fight scenes are way cooler, and yes, that’s my technical description for them. Most of the action is fueled by a fictional gun-fighting martial art discipline called Gun Kata, which was created by the film’s director, Kurt Wimmer. Fiction or not, the scenes in which the art is practiced – especially one of the last ones – are fascinating. I’d go so far as to say that even with a good storyline and some powerful moments, without the Gun Kata scenes, Equilibrium probably wouldn’t make my list of 200 “all-time favorite films.”
Popularity: 3% [?]
April 23rd, 2008 at 8:27 pm
My apologies for the original issues with this post. I somehow duplicated a portion of Ashleigh’s post without knowing.
It’s all better now.