Movie Reviews

If you crossed George Orwell's book Nineteen Eighty-Four with Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and then made a film out of it, Matrix-style, you'd get something that looked a lot like Equilibrium.

The film is set in the "not too distant future", after mankind has just barely survived a third World War. Certain that we would be unable to survive a fourth, world leaders decide that we must elimate the things that cause wars in the first place: feelings and emotions. To this extent, every single human is prescribed a daily dose of some kind of drug that induces a state of catatonic emotionlessness, and an elite group of enforcers called "clerics" are charged with the task of eliminating all objects (and people) who might possibly incite any kind of emotion or feeling in others. Just like in Fahrenheit 451, the clerics seek out and burn books, paintings, ornaments, recorded music, and anything else of the sort.

Equilibrium stars Christian Bale as John Preston, the most elite and accomplished of the clerics. Through a variety of circumstances, Preston misses a couple doses of the de-emoting drug, and begins to feel a fundamental wrongness about destroying books and other art. Eventually, he joins an underground group that is trying to bring down the system and restore humanity to the way it used to be.

The style of the film is very Matrix-y (almost to the point of rip-off-iness at times). The fight scenes, in particular, share a similarity with the Matrix, but there is a neat twist. Clerics are trained in the art of "gun-kata"; they study a huge library of past recorded gunfights, and come to the understanding that winning any gunfight is simply a matter of geometry and statistics. But nevermind, that stuff's not really important. What's important is that the clerics kick some serious gun-fight ass, and look pretty cool doing it.

I couldn't help but think how silly many parts of Equilibrium were (I mean, "gun-kata"? That's pretty goofy). But regardless of that, it was a pretty entertaining, very stylish, and generally fun movie.