Review: Equilibrium
Aug. 5th, 2007 03:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jeriendhalSummary: "Grammaton Cleric" (re: Man trained in the Way of Gun-Fu) John Preston is an enforcer of the law for the City of Librium, which was founded in the wake of WWIII with the mission to suppress all human emotions, from hate to love, in order to prevent another war, which mankind was even less likely to survive. This being that kind of movie, he naturally goes off his meds, discovers the joy and the pain of emotions, and sets out to destroy what he once protected.
Okay, combine a government that uses a patriarchal leader figure modeled on 1984's Big Brother, emotion suppressing drugs in the manner of Brave New World, and a tendency to burn books (they even have "firemen" of a sort) from Farenheit 451, plus the Gun-Fu (called "Gun Kata" in this case) and some vague philosophizing ala The Matrix, and you've got...
...actaully a fairly good movie. To its credit EQ isn't terribly ambitious. The story is streamlined, always moving forward and never bogging down too deeply in Gnostic pretentions like the Matrix films. It knows what it's doing, it is going to take the audience along with it, and the fact that for a couple of seconds it actually does make you sit down and think, and even appreciate a few moments of true beauty, works well in its favor.
Bale actaully plays the part of a man discovering emotions for the first time rather well. He's lousy at hiding them (but gets away with it for reasons made obvious in the final confrontation), attempting to keep them suppressed to maintaion his role, but every once and a while just flat out being overwhelmed by them as you might expect him to be. One of the most powerful moments in the film is when he rips away the translucent film covering the windows of his bedroom (allowing light in, but still making the room and the world murky and grey, which sums up Librium nicely) so he can see the sun coiming up over the city right after a downpour, rising over the city like a bright diamond. You buy into the idea that he's actually seeing that beauty, inherent even in this terrible city (parts of it were filmed in Rome and Berlin, taking advantage of much of the leftover Fascist archetecture that still stands around).
Hell, the cathartic moment, when Preston decides/is forced to Fight the System, comes when he saves the life of a puppy. Just read that and tell me your aren't just laughing a little at seeing that in a big budget action movie? But y'know, it's played straight and it actually works.
Other Random Observations:
1. Sean Bean, as seems typical when he plays a supporting role, is painfully underused. He's dead before the end of the first reel, and boy do you miss him, because the shadow of his character hangs over Preston's actions for the rest of the movie.
2. I don't know who the actor was playing Preston's new partner, but he was incredibly annoying. Way too freaking smirky for a guy whose emotions are supposed to be supressed.
2a. However, he is an agent working directly with "Father", and there are some reasonably subtle pointers to the fact that the rulers of the city don't bother taking the Prozium like the masses must.
3. I'm actually damned impressed that the film didn't use the obvious dramatic moment of Preston's son turning him in to the cops. Their last conversation in the movie points to the fact that the kid is just as clever as his dad, and that Librium's government is on even shakier ground than its masters believed.
4. It says something about us that the film's makers felt no compunction about showing hundreds of mooks and rebels being killed (the body count tops out at around 260), but the moment when the Gestapo is shooting the dogs that the rebels kept as pets, it's done tastefully off screen, all sound effects and Bale's emotional reactions to the slaughter. We're more desensitized to the murderous events of action films than we like to think about, but we can be remarkably hypocritical about it.
Okay, combine a government that uses a patriarchal leader figure modeled on 1984's Big Brother, emotion suppressing drugs in the manner of Brave New World, and a tendency to burn books (they even have "firemen" of a sort) from Farenheit 451, plus the Gun-Fu (called "Gun Kata" in this case) and some vague philosophizing ala The Matrix, and you've got...
...actaully a fairly good movie. To its credit EQ isn't terribly ambitious. The story is streamlined, always moving forward and never bogging down too deeply in Gnostic pretentions like the Matrix films. It knows what it's doing, it is going to take the audience along with it, and the fact that for a couple of seconds it actually does make you sit down and think, and even appreciate a few moments of true beauty, works well in its favor.
Bale actaully plays the part of a man discovering emotions for the first time rather well. He's lousy at hiding them (but gets away with it for reasons made obvious in the final confrontation), attempting to keep them suppressed to maintaion his role, but every once and a while just flat out being overwhelmed by them as you might expect him to be. One of the most powerful moments in the film is when he rips away the translucent film covering the windows of his bedroom (allowing light in, but still making the room and the world murky and grey, which sums up Librium nicely) so he can see the sun coiming up over the city right after a downpour, rising over the city like a bright diamond. You buy into the idea that he's actually seeing that beauty, inherent even in this terrible city (parts of it were filmed in Rome and Berlin, taking advantage of much of the leftover Fascist archetecture that still stands around).
Hell, the cathartic moment, when Preston decides/is forced to Fight the System, comes when he saves the life of a puppy. Just read that and tell me your aren't just laughing a little at seeing that in a big budget action movie? But y'know, it's played straight and it actually works.
Other Random Observations:
1. Sean Bean, as seems typical when he plays a supporting role, is painfully underused. He's dead before the end of the first reel, and boy do you miss him, because the shadow of his character hangs over Preston's actions for the rest of the movie.
2. I don't know who the actor was playing Preston's new partner, but he was incredibly annoying. Way too freaking smirky for a guy whose emotions are supposed to be supressed.
2a. However, he is an agent working directly with "Father", and there are some reasonably subtle pointers to the fact that the rulers of the city don't bother taking the Prozium like the masses must.
3. I'm actually damned impressed that the film didn't use the obvious dramatic moment of Preston's son turning him in to the cops. Their last conversation in the movie points to the fact that the kid is just as clever as his dad, and that Librium's government is on even shakier ground than its masters believed.
4. It says something about us that the film's makers felt no compunction about showing hundreds of mooks and rebels being killed (the body count tops out at around 260), but the moment when the Gestapo is shooting the dogs that the rebels kept as pets, it's done tastefully off screen, all sound effects and Bale's emotional reactions to the slaughter. We're more desensitized to the murderous events of action films than we like to think about, but we can be remarkably hypocritical about it.
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Date: 2007-08-05 05:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-05 07:28 pm (UTC)It was like so much classic SF where it really is not about the future (except that in selective cases they have added suffixes or prefixes like -ray, cyber-, electro-, etc.) but instead an ode to reactionary sentiments like, "Gosh, humans are just perfect right now and anything we change about the way we act will make everything worse. If we get rid of our flaws we'll lose something essentially human about us!"
With a nice couple of complementary side dishes that assume that people who will try to change us to be something like less emotional will be very emotional about doing so and also very stupid. "Gosh, even though we're absolutely dedicated to our ideology let's not go all the way to making the system as stable and inescapable as possible by using something like genetic enginiering, implanted automatic drug pumps, or anything else that even people in the late 20th century could dream up, but instead rely upon everyone in our society taking their pills on time. Because I'm sure they all will."
Not to mention the idea that somehow the nuclear family unit will still be the standard in a society that is so dedicated to getting rid of strong emotions that they're going to even burn pretty art. Because people get so much more emotional about art than they do about people they live with. And art is so darn infectious that we need to burn it all, too.
It almost makes me want to write a story where someone is trying to restore some flaw from humanity's past that has been eliminated and discovers, much too late, that it actually was a good idea to get rid of it and he's unleashed something as bad as smallpox upon the world.