Equilibrium

So the other night I saw 'Equilibrium', an futuristic action thriller with Christian Bale in it. Recently a lot of my friends have been raving about Batman, so I thought I'd give it a chance.

It was rubbish, frankly. The plot goes something like this: post WW3, humanity is under the control of a leader who believes that the elimination of emotions is a justifiable action to prevent war. To such extent, the population are compulsorily doped up on some drug to kill their feelings and the uber police (including Bale) goes round destroying all forms of art. Naturally, there is a resistance which get killed in fairly brutal way.

My problem with the film was that it was a hollywood-ified '1984' i.e. dumbed down with inflated violence. The resistance were labelled 'sense offenders' instead of 'thought criminals' and the drug might as well have been called soma. Secondly, It basically ran in the same vein as 'The Da Vinci Code' in making more peoples' brains mushy- it was trying to dress up an action flick into something smarter. Admittedly the fight scenes were pretty awesome, apparently drawing on a form of martial art called 'Gun Kata'. Bale, who plays gun master 'cleric' John Preston, is responsible for 118 out of 236 deaths in the film (half as many as he should have been in my opinion). Thirdly, I didn't think the acting was that great. I mean, I know it's hard to connect with an audience if you're portraying someone who's emotionless, but I seem to remember Preston's partner Brandt smiling during the inevitable fight to the death near the end, suggesting he's enjoying the fight. This kind of lapse happened a lot during the film which kind of ruins any credibility it builds up.

But the fight scenes were awesome.