Equilibrium

I wanted to like Equilibrium. It has Sean Bean and Christian Bale, pre-Batman. It has black leather. It had no kickass chick, but I could forgive that given adequate plot and/or action.

I didn’t like it. Oh, there was action, but it wasn’t quite what it could have been. There was decent acting. The problem was the plot itself. The world portrayed made no sense at all. The setup is pretty standard sci fi — post-apocalyptic world wherein people are under the thumb of some Big Government Doing It All For The People. Everyone takes a dose of Prozium every time the alarm goes off. This eliminates the cause of all violence, i.e., people’s feelings. Father is on every tv screen, every window, every wall, and a bunch of blimps for good measure, preaching the good word of peace and harmony. While people who squirrel away art and music and refuse to take the drug are hunted down and killed with machine gun toting psychopaths - no feelings, no remorse, just doing my job, ma’am. And this is the part that makes no sense — it’s sort of like those early TOS episodes where Spock didn’t show any emotions, except Nimoy totally couldn’t make his facial expression emotionless consistently, so you got someone who speaks in monotone and pulled these faces…. Except that was Spock. I loved Spock. I believed in Spock. The cast of Equilibrium didn’t even get it as emotionless as Nimoy; everyone shouts angrily, including the head dude, and what I couldn’t get was — head dude is all losing his temper up one side and down the other, why aren’t they shooting him? They turn on other high ranking folk immediately when someone shows emotion. Oh, except when it wouldn’t be convenient for the pot.

Bale is the top dog, the #1 Cleric — sort of a ninja enforcer class with a side order of gun-fu, which is a sooper special martial art used to avoid getting shot while shooting everyone else in sight (they didn’t call it gun-fu, I do). The plot twists were there, but they were of the “yeah, right” sort. Nothing in the world building is convincing enough for anyone who thinks for five minutes. I turned off the documentary on the DVD the instant I heard someone say “the intelligence of the plot” - there wasn’t any. There were guns, and leather, and people in riot gear, and a mu-hu-hahahaHA villain, who didn’t do the laugh but might as well have. Someone could have rewritten the story a couple more times and made a better movie.

Only rent it if it’s free and you’ve seen every other movie in the universe. Unless you’re a die hard Sean Bean or Christian Bale fan. Then I would suggest a drinking game in which you take two hits every time there’s a full frontal face shot of Bale. You should be pickled by the movie’s climactic battle, in which Bale goes Kill Bill on the bad guy’s minions.