Equilibrium (2002)
It's easy to see what makes Equilibrium appealing to some but this dystopian action film has a fatal flaw that unfortunately cripples it beyond repair. It's a lot less intelligent than it thinks it is.
Set after a third world war in the early 21st century, cleric John Preston (Christian Bale) is part of an elite task force charged with taking down “sense offenders”. In this future, emotions are outlawed and people repress them using medication. When an accident at home causes Preston to miss a dose, he becomes a sense offender himself.
You see what the film's trying to do. Artwork, music, poetry, fiction, love, basically anything creative, anything that could arouse emotion or derived from emotion is outlawed. Unfortunately, the set and costume designers couldn't help themselves and didn't quite commit. If the people of this dystopia were truly determined to eliminate everything associated with emotions, then everyone’s clothes should be the same, every building should look the same, every surface should have the same texture and color. On paper, this wouldn't be an issue but in a movie, you've got to overlook a lot. Let's say you do. Even then, you spot flaws right away. This entire civilization depends on self-medication and it only takes one missed dose to send cracks throughout the system. We've seen similar scenarios work elsewhere, which is probably the issue. This is not a novel idea and the execution isn't smart enough to make us forgive this fact.
Not helping are the performances. Everyone's too good! I’ve seen plenty of awful actors that would have been perfect for the roles of emotionless, robot-like workers in a society that oppresses all feelings. Instead, Kurt Wimmer employs men and women who can’t not emote. No one should be delivering a wink or a smile after that one-liner, or screaming as they’re about to die. I hate to hang onto this point for so long but this is where a simple re-write would've done wonders. Instead of no emotion, just say they're severely suppressed.
You wonder why someone could enjoy the film? Because of the action. The moves our supercop displays while apprehending criminals is truly awesome. Gunshots are merged with martial arts in a spectacular and unique genre of combat - gun kata. When you see it in action, you forget about everything that rubbed you the wrong way previously. It isn’t just one big fight towards the end either. There are numerous action sequences throughout and they’re nicely varied.
Equilibirum suffers from flaws that are hard to overlook. If you're the kind of person that can be dazzled with cool fighting sequences and the idea of becoming the guy that might topple the fascist regime single-handedly entices you so much that you won’t be able to even think of the illogical bits, then you'll go nuts for this film. In that sense, I can recommend it, but only to a select audience. For everyone else, Equilibrium gets a middle-of-the-road rating, a 2,5/5. (On Blu-ray, February 7, 2015)
