Equilibrium

Sunday, October 12, 2003 » movies thought

Just thought I'd mention this before it drops off the recent movies list.

Several weeks ago I finally got the chance to see Equilibrium, a little-known action movie that came out last December or so. Its plot takes place in an Orwellian dystopia where a city's population takes regular doses of the drug Prozium, designed to suppress the high ranges of emotion and thus prevent war. Christian Bale plays John Preston, one of the super police officers (or "Grammaton clerics") assigned with hunting down "sense offenders," which are Equilibrium's answer to thought criminals. Of course, one day Preston misses his dosage of Prozium and begins to feel, contacts the resistance, blah blah blah, and amazing action sequences ensue.

The martial art employed by the Grammaton clerics, the goofily-named gun-kata, teaches the clerics to treat their dual pistols as extensions of their limbs, as well as trains them to dodge enemy fire based on the most probable return trajectories recorded from extensive gun battle records, blah blah blah. Of course, you hardly see any of the gun-kata theory on screen, but what you do see is unbelievable. Admittedly, the opening shootout is not very impressive and reawakened my fears that maybe there wasn't any merit to this movie after all, but in the second gunfight, Bale's character moves with deadly efficiency and deliberation, a human turret who illuminates the darkened set with disturbingly artistic patterns of gunfire. Although the scene was criminally brief, afterward I was left in complete awe.

For the rest of the movie, the only issue I had with the plot was that it meant longer waits between the action scenes. The final sequence pits Preston against Equilibrium's Big Brother character in a furious, close-range gun-kata battle, with the two waving their guns back and forth in front of each other's faces, trying to get off a shot at point-blank. It's probably the most amazing duel since actually-Keanu-Reeves squared off with actually-Laurence-Fishburne in The Matrix. The brevity of all the fights, though, makes me wonder if the choreographers had too much trouble putting together such innovative sequences. (The trailer also hinted at a samurai sword battle between two clerics, which never happens. However, at one point a guy does get his face cut off. So insane.)

I also want to mention that it has style points out the wan (the normally black-clad cleric donning a brand new white suit for the final battle scenes, oooh symbolic~), and on top of that it gets an extra point for the incredibly blatant fusion of the Christian cross and a swastika.

So basically, Equilibrium is an excellent collection of some of the best fight scenes in recent years, and they're all sandwiched between long stretches of ho-hum plot.

You should probably rent it, though.