Equilibrium (2002) Review

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7/10

Equilibrium comes straight out of that Hollywood period when every movie tried to be The Matrix (1999). As a teenager, I thought this movie was so cool and I guess I was the target demographic, but looking back at it now, the influences of more successful science fiction movies like The Matrix are so obvious that it is almost embarrassing. I mean, look at it. Look at the poster: guys in long black coats, posing with guns, and set in some dystopian future.

So, the writer and director Kurt Wimmer (who didn’t do much else interesting, except perhaps work on the screenplay of the Total Recall remake) tried to combine The Matrix with the world of George Orwell’s 1984. This is a world in which it is forbidden to show emotions, and the thought-police will eliminate you if they find out you have any. John Preston (Christian Bale) is one of those police agents and is trained in the secret fighting technique gun-kata (another nod to the use of kung-fu in The Matrix). The resistance wins him over, and he helps to bring down the system.

Looking back at the dystopian world of Equilibrium from the year 2018, we have seen the dystopia adopted by Young Adult series: the Hunger Games, Maze Runner and Divergent series. Equilibrium’s future is recognizably similar in how simplistic and extreme it is; not much more than a metaphor about humanity and hard to take seriously. I guess it is about how humanity should deal with our emotions in a healthy way and let “the better angels of our nature” shine through, and to suppress all feeling is to remove our very humanity. There. We understand this concept from the very beginning of the film – every viewer knows that this is wrong in the first scene – and now we just have to wait 1 hour and 45 minutes for this future world to catch up on our wisdom. It’s refreshing though that the cast is not populated by teenagers.

There is good and bad to the film’s storytelling. The bad is characterized by laziness and copycat storytelling. The great leader speaks to the people via giant TV screens in public places, like in the Divergent series. It is such a lazy way to explain the story. It is basically just a piece of opening narration to explain the setting without showing it to us organically through actual storytelling. I also just never really understood this film, because actors are showing emotions all over the place in this film. I mean, they show anger and curiosity and frustration, but why are these not considered offences?

The good, though, is pretty good. The music and camerawork are, well, let’s call it overzealous or ambitious, but mostly make this an interesting film to look at. Camera-angles are all well-chosen, the music is actually pretty mediocre, made of sound bites from Media Venture, but give it a heavy, solemn feel. The Stalinist architecture hints at cold war messages but since the film is not that old, I suppose it is just shown because it feels oppressive. The best parts are when John Preston starts reconnecting with his feelings. At these moments, the movie shows more colors to accentuate his experiences. The action scenes are also exhilarating and still hold up 20 years later.

The best thing about these action scenes and “emotion scenes” is that they are carefully metered out and don’t overwhelm the film. As the film progresses, two things happen in parallel: Preston feels more and more emotion and the action gets more and more bloody, as if to mirror Preston’s increasing sensitivity to violence. Thus, they feel special when they come and Equilibrium as a whole feels like a balanced film, especially compared to many modern special-effects laden blockbusters. Overall, the film may be very derivative and this future is hard to take seriously, but it still works fine as an entertaining action movie.