Equilibrium (2002)

Equilibrium is first movie directed and written by Kurt Wimmer. I will review the other one next Friday. Original plan was to follow this review with reviews of 1984, Fahrenheit 451 and Matrix. Why those three you may ask. Because this movie has very little that wasn't in those three movies. World is quite like from 1984, Story is from Fahrenheit 451 and visual and action scenes are heavily inspired by Matrix.

Idea was to check if Equilibrium really copied those movies as much as I remember. I have all three movies on dvds but dvds are somewhere on my storage system which is optimized to take as little space as possible. So I decided to make theme of what Kurt Wimmer could do by himself when he has original story compared to what he could do with heavily influenced story. Except that this is not fair comparison but I get back to that on Friday.

Feelings were outlawed after third world war. Rationale was that feelings cause violence. Humans are using drugs to kill their feelings and everything that can cause feelings is forbidden. All kind of art is destroyed when found. People are brainwashed with government's messages on streets and televisions. Parents have to be scared of their kids who might tell authorities their parents have feelings.

Grammaton clerics are special forces of government. They have own martial art called Gun Kata. One cleric can win group of men in gun fight. Clerics follow other forces when they fight against sense offenders, people who don't take their drugs and save art from government. Movie tells one cleric's way from top cleric to sense offender and rebel against government.

Before watching this for review I only had one problem with this movie. Gun Kata would be really ineffective in real life. It is based on statistics. It doesn't take account that other side may learn same statistics and predict where cleric moves next. Clerics just shoot to directions which statistics say cause most damage. When style involves jumping in middle of group of opponents it is really easy to invent counter measures. Like everyone jumping on cleric when he is in the middle. If you don't want to get into hand in hand combat you can stay far from cleric. Long distance fighting is not part of Gun Kata.

When I watched this for review I saw more minor problems. Movie prefers to have cool scenes over those scenes making any sense. Preston, the main character, would have been caught many times since he did so little to hide the fact he had stopped taking the drugs. There is explanation for this but it didn't really give reason why he was not caught by someone.

Equilibrium is entertaining if you don't think too much. Action scenes are stupid but they look good. Christian Bale and Sean Bean are good. Emily Watson was ok. Other main characters weren't as good which hurts the movie a bit. There are few really cool scenes. It is different matter if they make sense. As I said, this in entertaining if you don't think too much.