Equilibrium

I doubt I'd ever even have heard of this 2002 dystopian movie had Keith never shown it to me one night back in college. After a second viewing a year or so later, I still wasn't really sure if I was ultimately ambivalent toward the mostly forgotten film or if I had developed, like Keith, an actual appreciation for it. When I recently found the DVD on sale in some bargain bin or another, I knew it was time for a third viewing, this time going solo and without anyone around to hype it up. My conclusion? That Equilibrium is a fun but strangely flawed movie. Released within a year of Minority Report and both Matrix sequels, Equilibrium was a failure both critically (37% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) and commercially ($20 million budget, $1.2 million domestic box office). But it's got all the makings of a decent and likable movie. There's a solid cast, there's a great sense of atmosphere and set design, there's beautiful gunfight choreography, and there's a generic enough plot - high-ranking and respected agent of the dystopian state undergoes life-altering experience and then comes to rebel against the dystopian state - that the movie never grows overly convoluted or confusing. But where Equilibrium falls short of becoming a legitimately good movie trapped with a bad movie's reputation is in trying to answer that broad question all dystopian fiction must in some way answer. "Why does this world work this way?" The movie begins with some expository narration about how there was a third world war in the early twenty-first century, and how in order to prevent a fourth one, the various governments of the world needed to get rid of people's... emotions. Right off the bat, we've got a flawed concept. Emotions don't lead to warfare. They lead to small-scale fighting and violence, for sure, but global wars tend to be based on economics, famine, religious fanaticism, and other basic concepts that have always risen and abated regardless of human emotion. This isn't to say that there's no place for anti-emotion agencies in dystopian fiction; placating the masses is a huge trope when it comes to totalitarian states, but this is typically so that the people won't rise up and overthrow an oppressive regime, not so that there will be no more wars. I suppose you could make the argument that the movie is intentionally holding its cards close to its chest, and that maybe we're only given the same shoddy anti-emotional rhetoric that the government is using on the people, but the issues don't stop there; countless times throughout the film we see people acting on certain emotions - rage, jealousy, the desire to protect loved ones - and these emotions are never called into question or punished. It seems as though the world of Equilibrium seeks only to curtail certain emotions at certain times, but the distinctions are never really made clear, and this lack of clarity rears its head especially hard when the punishment for feeling things - "sense crime" - turns out to be immediate execution without trial. Compounding the issue is an unwaveringly dark and humorless tone that never lets up for Christian Bale's character to even so much as crack a smile or laugh or weep while holding another person in his arms; even after he discovers what it is to have feelings, he never really seems to have any. I'm not sure if this is the general issue critics had with the movie, or if it's in some way why audiences never showed up, but this strange and specific flaw is what kept me, ultimately, form fully enjoying Equilibrium. And that's a shame, especially because of how many components of a really good movie there actually are here. Some of the gunfight scenes, I should reiterate, are really just incredibly choreographed and well-made. In the end, if Equilibrium is nothing more than a solid combination of acting, action, and ambiance, it's still worth seeing. Maybe not three times, but at least once.