Film Review: Equilibrium

6/22/2004

Equilibrium: This is a film that, when I saw the preview in the theater, I filed away under "Drivel, With Gun Fu." Now that I've had a chance to watch it, thanks to the combined collaborative efforts of my TiVo and Showtime, I can confirm that my original assessment was 100% correct. Possibly more.

This film, which I just have to assume was heavily, heavily influenced by the success of the first Matrix, was written and directed by Kurt Wimmer, writer of Sphere, Thomas Crown Affair, Recruit, and the upcoming Ultraviolet, a vampiresque sci-fi vehicle for Milla Jovovoich. Using this film's wholesale stripmining of Matrix, I wonder if Ultraviolet is going to be Underworld 2.0. Anyway, Equilibrium smacks of an imaginative guy, sitting in the theater after Matrix credits are rolling, thinking: "I can do that, but better!" and unfortunately, while a few scenes capitalize on the film language that Matrix defined for us, most of the film as a whole, is almost unbearable. Just as the final two Matrix films could be distilled into about 20 minutes of FX, cinematography and concept in short film, Animatrix-style format, so too could Equilibrium. In fact, if given the chance to do this all over again, get my two hours back and all that, I would choose to watch the Equilibrium trailer instead of the full film: it was tight, well-paced, chock full of great FX shots and in general a pretty kick-ass little ride for 60 seconds or so. Unfortunately, when a film is worse than it's preview, there's a serious problem.




Christian Bale plays Proctor Preston, an enforcer, which is analogous to the Matrix's Agent Smiths, who is tasked with hunting down a criminal underground that rejects the use of the emotion-purging drug Prozium, and gathers secretly to obsess about art and nostalgic cultural items and hump each other and cry and do all the things, it is implied, that humanity is now forbidden to do, in the interest of preventing a future Holocaust (purge the emotion, purge the baisc desire, and you eliminate the motive for genocide and similar atrocities, so the thinking goes, excpet…narcissism is one of the scariest mental states I can think of, and without feelings and emotions, why WOULDN’T people harm each other? The argument is false.) He loses a partner to the seduction of the emotive underworld, and soon is tested himself, as he gets a taste of how the other half lives, specifically off of the permanently hotly made up Emily Watson's quivering lower lip. Bale is visually impressive in the role, looking serious, solemn and competent as a super-soldier type guy. Unfortunately, his lisp and mouth movements were distracting me at all the wrong times, which gave me my first concern over a Bale Batman.



Sean Bean is used effectively as the Proctor with a tear in his eye, and, as usual, only makes a brief appearance.



Taye Diggs is the antagonist here, a rival Proctor with career ambition and an alpha male chip on his shoulder (but no emotions, despite the sneering and gesturing, and attitude, and chiding and cleverness in general) and while there are a few other actors involved, most notably Willaim Fichtner (HEAT alumnus alert!) part of the emptiness of the film is that the same three or four people travel from empty desolate spaces, to crowds of generic, vaguely-Huegenot rebel scum, to clusters of riot police with motorcycle helmets on indoors.



It's kind of creepy.



It should be obvious that Emily Watson's subtlety, which was so endearing in Punch Drunk love, is completely wasted here.

The script is lifted from a microwaved goulash of Farenheit 451, 1984, and approximately seventeen WWII documentaries on the Nazi Occupation of Western Europe, after which the mix is gooped down through a sluice plate made from sci-fi dystopian allegory, and the resulting serum compressed into a formwork comprising islands of semi-solid philosophical rhetoric, isolated by a strong current of scowling, shooting, driving and blinding people with lights. It's all made even more frustrating by the fact that Wimmer tried to infuse his action movie with a thematic core, but did it with such obvious heavy-handedness that the result is too shallow to sustain itself. One of the happy compromises with the Matrix was that it distilled a decade and a half of Cyberpunk literary concepts into a innovatively digestable format: it wasn't particularly complex, but it wove the allegory into the action such that most of the mainstream audience gobbled it right up. It wasn't satisfying if you follow Gibson, Williams, Sterling, Stephenson etc. but hell, it was a good primer. In Equilibrium, however, the message is far too blanched to anchor a film: personal freedoms (emotion, passion, speech, desire) are the key to life, and suppressing them is really bad. I thought the script was disappointingly thin regarding rationalizing such a stark, fascist state, and the wholesale indoctrination of the populace into the teachings of a singular individual's philosophy. The set design did a far better job, by invoking Nazi futurist imagery in the architecture, the Zeppelins, the severe uniforms, etc. and combining them with the contemporary symbol of urban oppression: the riot police. It certainly LOOKED consistent.



Of course, no sooner do i write this, then I consider that, like the Matrix did so well, they inserted select hipster imagery to give it that slick look: an all white, detailed Caddie with rims, guns with sharp pointy edges, Neru collars the size of Texas...so maybe, not so consistent, but rather, harmonious.

At it's heart, though, Equilibrium's mission is to give us rad action sequences, and there are a few of them.



Virtually all of them involve a sort of 'gun fu,' often called gun-kata, where martial arts moves and extremacrobaticscs complicate short rangballistictc weapon combat. I mean, it looks GREAT. It's so out of whack from reality or logic that it's actually not the hardest pill to swallow in context.



If you don't actually think about it, anyway. In one scene, we have abirds-eye-view of Bale pivoting in quick rotation, like a top, obliterating a circular firirng squad (joke, anyone...… anyone) by striking a rapid series of cool firing poses stolen from Terminator 2, but with the footage sped up so the staccato of weaponsfire reporting and the flashes of light showing his different poses actually becomes mesmerizing, almost graceful. At the very least, it's a video game combo.





This type of shoot-em-while-they-surround-you-in-a-circle-since-you're-the-only-one-that-was-taught-gun-kata scene happens a number of times, and it always impresses, admittedly. He hits cool poses, like one where he strikes a kung fu defensive posture, with wrists together, extended, one barrel up, one barrel down, brow furrowed in meditation. I could visualize the concept art for that one. In another scene, Bale hurls these weighted clips with down a hallway at approaching riot police, which come to rest upright on spherical bases, and then engages in a running, leaping, spinning ballet move of autofire, in which, at some point, he lands on the ground, or slides or whatever, so that his guns, with their expended clips ejected off-camera, come down ON THE CLIPS, and he continues his freakish inertia, firing away down the corridor. Another great storyboard.




Though the design of these little details seems to change from scene to scene, at one point his guns are quick loaded from his otherwise-tightly fitted sleeves, and in another sequence, extra clips (but not the weighted ones) are quick loaded INTO THE WEAPON, again from his sleeves. It's like some guys were sitting around brainstorming this stuff over pizza. In another scene, Bale is running, takes a leap, lands on an automatic weapon on the ground, nailing a virtual pivot point in the weapon's stock so that it pops up into the air and he can catch it from behind and start mowing down bad guys.

From a cinematography standpoint, some scenes were well shot, amidst the reels of boring fascist state imagery. In one scene that comes to mind, a man is executed while reading a book, and the shot is done form a side-view angle, and you see a puff of shredded paper billow around the victim. In a climactic action sequence, the participants switch to edged weapons, and Bale has changed into a 'ceremonial,' and by ceremonial I mean symbolic good guy white, duds, with a matching white enamel sword and scabbard, and the subsequent action is so immediate, short and sweet that it puts retroactive exclamation point on the excess of all that gun-fu we sat through previously.



It was one of the few startlingly effective scenes in the film. Another effective scene was the burning of the Mona Lisa in the opening sequence, which claimed for Spain half a dozen memes from film and literary culture.



A final note about imagery in the film: I freely admit that not every film must have substance. Particularly in a day and age when the FX, visual style, and hipster crispness of the imagery of each of these films become an attempt to upstage the last one, before the next one does it all even better.



It's fine with me. I like looking at some of these scenes, and if the creators come up with some new tricks, i'm all for it. If there's room in our fatty, bloated, superficial, indulgent, mindless, surface-oriented culture for so much queasy sameness on every TV channel, radio station and package label, there's gotta be some room for this film language to get a little redundant in the process of trying to outcool itself. So I loaded this review up with images, and I think of them fondly when considering this film. It would just be nice to watch something like this with actual substance behind it.

So, my robotic recommendation to you is this: watch the trailer, and enjoy the short-attention-span-theater version, and suddenly, you have 118 minutes of free time!

6/10 Clicks (generous, due to all of that snappy gun-kata!)

So says...Wrongrobot!

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