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
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