Equilibrium

#6 - Equilibrium

 

SUMMARY (spoilers in Summary and Review)

 In a future where all emotion is suppressed and considered to be the cause of every bad thing that’s happened in the world’s history, a law man who is dedicated to serving this cause finds himself mixed up in a plot to destroy the drug that’s keeping everyone in check.  The question is will he continue to fight for what he thinks to be right?  Or will he fight for the right to be free to feel once more?

REVIEW

This is one of those all-star cast movies that slipped through the cracks and somehow only got one star out of four.  Starring Christian Bale, Sean Bean, Taye Diggs, Emily Watson, and William Fichtner, it’s a movie that is reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984, but with a dangerous twist.  Instead of Big Brother controlling you…you are controlling you, with a drug called Prozium that suppresses any and all emotion.  Emotion is outlawed, and feeling anything at all will, at the very least, land you in prison for what are called sense crimes.  In the very beginning, his partner is arrested for breaking this law simply by reading a book.

 

 

 

Recently, I watched this movie for the second time and paid closer attention to the music and the atmosphere of the movie, as well as the acting, and I was amazed by the performance given by Christian Bale in his character of John Preston.  In this role, Bale has to portray a man with no emotion slowly giving into emotion and trying to deal with it, and he does a beautiful job at doing so.  In one particularly intense scene, Preston and his new partner find a pack of dogs behind a building and his partner gives the order to kill them, and with each shot that is fired, Preston (Bale) twitches just slightly, but it’s enough of a reaction to have us reacting right along with him, as well as seeing the contrast with his unresponsive partner.  It gives us a reference for the true horror that is going on in our world deprived of all emotion.

 

This movie is one of those side movies that is made for those kind of people who like to think the dangerous thoughts about the direction that our society is heading towards.  The writers for this movie took a simple plotline and made it psychologically complex, as well as making us look to the future not necessarily with hope, but with utter fear.

 

 

Done in monochromatic shades throughout, the colors do not change until we arrive at the end of the movie and come to the climactic ending scene; the fight in the inner chambers of the government.  Beautiful, amazing, and stunning, Bale was perfect for his role and truly made this movie an artwork.

I would recommend it, and say to those reviewers who only gave it one out of four stars, that they do not know what they’re talking about… it got four out of four in my book!