Thursday, September 24, 2015

Equilibrium (2002, R)

I really like this movie.  It’s a cool, stylish dystopian film with good heart and great performances, and though its main plot is fairly dystopian-standard, the premise is compelling and well-executed.  I recently watched it again and was reminded how much I enjoy it.

Equilibrium is a bit similar to the Delirium series in that evil government’s goal is to numb the submissive population, but instead of focusing specifically on love, all emotion here is regarded as dangerous subversion.  Every citizen injects themselves daily with a drug that inhibits their emotions, and an elite police force called the clerics is devoted to rooting out the “sense offenders” who secretly forego the drug.  Our protagonist, John Preston, is a dedicated cleric whose entire worldview is scrambled one day thanks to an accidental missed dose, a tiny window of time just long enough to let in the emotions that have been held back from him his entire life.

I previously singled out Preston as one of my top five Christian Bale roles.  His performance here is stunning.  Preston is at first wholly unfeeling – and not just unfeeling, but unable to even comprehend the idea of feeling.  His existence is so paltry and half-lived, but he hasn’t the slightest idea what he’s missing.  Then, when his emotions are accidentally unlocked, it’s remarkable to watch this insensible, highly-controlled man get knocked over by the strength of feelings he’s never experienced.  He has no context for what’s happening, and even as it terrifies him (both for the illegality of sense offense and for the power of his unsuppressed emotions,) he can’t bring himself to go back, because he realizes there’s something so ecstatic about being able to feel.  I especially love his private moments of reacting for the first time to beautiful things.  A big part of the clerics’ job, a la Fahrenheit 451, is finding/destroying sense offenders’ secret hordes of forbidden objects – paintings, music, and poetry, but simpler bric-a-brac as well – and Preston’s first experience hearing Beethoven on a confiscated record is gorgeous.  But of course, Preston is now a sense offender in a field specifically trained to uncover sense offenders, and so Bale’s performance shifts again, this time showing the second, emotional Preston trying to disguise his demeanor and pretend to be the earlier, unfeeling Preston.  Just fantastic all around.

It’s not a perfect movie.  It can be kind of heavy-handed (I mean, of course he winds up in a situation where his fellow clerics are executing a bunch of puppies, pretty much just cuz,) and some of the twists in the last act don’t quite work for me.  However, it’s still a fine film that does some pretty neat things.  I also like the cool-looking “gun kata” combat style used in the movie, and it gets further bonus points for using a Yeats quote that isn’t from “The Second Coming.”  Don’t get me wrong; I like “The Second Coming,” but it’s the one you hear every time pop culture references Yeats, and I love the poem quoted here and how it’s incorporated into the film.  “Be careful, Preston.  You’re treading on my dreams…”

In addition to Bale, the movie features Taye Diggs as a shrewd, ambitious cleric and Emily Watson as a sense offender.  We also get a little from the always-reliable Hey It’s That Guy! William Fichtner, and Sean Bean is terrific in a small role.

Warnings

Violence and thematic elements.

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