ORWELLIAN SILLINESS
Equilibrium
IMDB
dir. Kurt Wimmer starring: Christian Bale, Emily Watson, Taye Diggs, Sean Bean
Falling solidly in the category of action cheese is Kurt Wimmer's Equilibrium, a movie that runs like a pastiche of every Orwellian dystopia you've ever read about combined with action sequences that fall slightly short of imaginative. Equilibrium is decent entertainment as long as you don't look too hard at its ideas or its obvious sources.

Guys in black with guns. What else do you need to know?

Equilibrium is set in a neo-fascist world society where war, conflict and crime have largely been eliminated by eliminating the source of all conflict which, according to this movie's thesis, is human emotion itself. People in this future society who still have feelings are named sense criminals and are reported to a leather-clad wearing Gestapo called 'clerics' for reeducation or, in countless numbers throughout this movie, for summary execution.

An up-and-comer in the ranks of the clerics is John Preston played by Christian Bale. Like the other elite members of the clerics he is a master of bizarre martial art gunkata, which supposedly boils down the essence of all gunfights into a discipline. This is an excuse for all clerics to blow away dozens of hapless opponents in every scene without so much as a bullet nick. On first glance it looks as silly as hell. But after the second or third scenes it becomes cheesy goodness that only fans of B-action films will appreciate. Yes, it's derivative of the Matrix, but give a pat on the back to the filmmakers for attempting it.

Preston and his partner Partridge (Sean Bean) lead riot squads against a rebel underground who traffic in artwork, nostalgic kitsch and, get this, puppies. Anything that could evoke feeling is contraband that must be wiped out, and their purveyors are generally just gunned down after putting up a feeble defense. No matter, the gunkata masters cannot be stopped. However, a crack appears in their authority when Preston discovers Partridge reading a copy of Yeats and becoming sentimental over it. The hard man that he is, Preston executes his partner.

Lots of shooty shooty action in this one

This turns out to be the first step towards recovering feelings for Preston as the death of his partner unearths memories of his own wife's execution for sense crimes. Finally, Preston stops taking the required mind dumbing drugs everyone in the dull society must gobble and he begins to awaken his own emotions. In one very nice scene in an otherwise heavy-handed picture, Preston tears down the opaque screen on his window to reveal the beauty of the sunrise peaking through the Metropolis-like cityscape. This starts him on a path to reject the system he works for and yes, you've seen this a number of times before.

You could run a day long festival of films about future policemen turning on their own system. From Logan's Run to Minority Report to Blade Runner, there's a long tradition of questioning authority and Equilibrium plunders from them all. You can draw lines from the production design of The Matrix to the action set-pieces in Equilibrium that come across as smaller-budget, smaller-scale, almost TV versions of those scenes. Squint and you'll see Tom Cruise from Minority Report rather than the perfectly adequate Christian Bale. The outside environments are better lit versions of Blade Runner albeit mostly computer-generated.

Criticizing its derivations misses the point. It really is an excuse for a lot of kicking and shooting fun. The heroes do lots of slow motion, ridiculously meticulous stunts. Baddies fall like leaves, riddled with bullets. And there are two totally gratuitous samurai sword fights.

Equilibrium is neither a smart, nor original movie. But for a film about stamping out all feeling, it certainly does make you laugh.

Coming soon on DVD