Release Date: December 6, 2002
Starring: Christian Bale, Emily Watson, Taye Diggs, Angus MacFadyen, Sean Bean, William Fichtner
Directed by: Kurt Wimmer
Written by: Kurt Wimmer
Distributed by: Miramax Films
MPAA Rating: R (violence)
One of the philosophies of all great action movies is that they shouldn't have philosophies about anything. The bad guys in writer-director Kurt Wimmer's Equilibrium would certainly agree with this, because they believe the key to world peace lies in the abolition of all senses, emotions, and, by extension, philosophies. They would also probably add Equilibrium to their list of banned materials. Because although the movie contains a sampling of guns-blazing action heavily influenced by The Matrix (so extensively, in fact, that it is almost a disservice to the viewer's intelligence to mention it), it also features a soggy, all-consuming philosophical debate about the benefits of human emotion that drags the plot down and strangles the movie's more original moments.
In a fascist future, world peace has indeed been achieved with the absence of complex thought. Humankind has been persuaded by a neo-political evangelist known as the Father to self-administer a tranquilizing drug, Prozium, that has essentially turned everyone into emotional zombies. While this means words like "love" and "joy" have no more meaning, it also means that there is no animosity -- or war. Underground violators of this new world order are arrested and executed by government agents known as Grammaton clerics, an elite class of futuristic samurai whose combat training renders them almost untouchable.
The best of these is Cleric John Preston (Christian Bale, in a succinct but well-rendered performance), who, after missing his dose of Prozium one day, begins to experience the heretofore-unknown world of sense and emotion -- he becomes a "sense offender," in the movie's jargon. His missed injection also sparks the movie's main conflict: Should Preston visit a public commissary, procure a replacement dosage, and rejoin the world of Prozium, in which there are none of the worldly evils we know so well? Or should he eat of the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and experience the joys of a beautiful sunset or rainbow or woman at the cost of facing the death and human suffering his job mandates with newly opened eyes?
As it turns out, he chooses the path less traveled (there wouldn't be a movie otherwise), and soon, in Orwellian fashion, he's constantly casting a wary eye over his shoulder, on the lookout for anyone who might turn him in. That includes his new partner, Cleric Brandt (Taye Diggs, doing a role that's so relatively small it begs the question of why he takes up half the poster), but if so, then the irony is thick for Preston: Early in the movie, he discovers his former partner, Partridge (Sean Bean), reading the collected works of Yeats, and turns him in.
The tension between Brandt and Preston, however, portends a more climactic confrontation between the two -- one of the movie's many extravagant fight scenes done up in the style of The Matrix, equal parts homage and challenge to that standard of martial arts and gunplay. Wimmer has an exquisite sense of fight choreography, and the clerics' unique fighting style -- based entirely on mathematical probability -- lends itself to some eye-popping cinematography.
Over the course of the movie's 110 minutes, though, these scenes are actually quite sparse, especially because the first two-thirds of the movie is devoted to exposition for a story that never comes. The purpose of the movie's bulk is to establish the dystopic world of Equilibrium, as well as the faceless, emotionless drones that inhabit it, so as to provide our hero with a suitably disagreeable enemy against which he can demonstrate his proficient martial arts skills and weapons mastery. It's the same narrative shortcut used by geopolitical technothrillers of the Tom Clancy/James Bond flavor, in which the neo-Nazis or North Koreans or former Soviets are presented as the bad guys du jour -- simply because they're faceless, fanatical, and not like us.
Despite this extended period of exposition, the movie leaves several questions unanswered. It seems unlikely that someone like Preston, the government's top cleric, might miss his Prozium dosage so easily. And that, having done so, he wouldn't experience any sort of withdrawal. Or that, having lived his entire life without feeling or emotion, he wouldn't abhor these experiences when they suddenly flooded his senses. The movie, essentially, assumes this futuristic race of people is exactly like the moviegoers of the early 21st century. For that matter, it also assumes the audience is made up of middle-class Americans, the sort of individuals who would be willing to risk human suffering for the chance to read Yeats. But what about the peoples of war-torn countries today? They're utterly unaffected by the movie's Fahrenheit 451-inspired paradigm, and might even see the loss of emotion in exchange for world peace as something of a bargain.
But intelligence isn't the movie's strong suit. The use of the title "cleric" for the government's enforcers is questionable, considering that it is primarily a religious one, and although the argument could be made that the lack of emotion in the movie's civilization is something of a religion, it's incongruous with the policies that the clerics enforce. And, on another note, Wimmer's script makes frequent reference to Yeats's poem, "He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven," but misinterprets the lines it cites ("Tread softly because you tread on my dreams," says Partridge, as a way of warning Preston of his inhuman transgressions, but the speaker of the poem was essentially issuing a "handle with care" dictum).
Audiences looking for a polished societal commentary here, though, must have missed out on several other films or books which tackled the same material to greater success, including both Fahrenheit 451 and 1984, or Andrew Niccol's 1997 film, Gattaca. Even as recently as in Minority Report, which predated this movie's release by about six months, audiences were treated to the story of a future in which a dedicated government agent realizes the flaws of a system he has worked so hard to preserve only after the system turns against him. Stylistically, even if it borrows from The Matrix, it's nothing for Wimmer to be ashamed of; as far as the story goes, however, Equilibrium hardly has the balance its title suggests.
all contents © 2002 Craig Roush