Hey folks, Harry here... we've been hearing bout this one for quite some time now. While it doesn't sound like the most original thing in town, it does sound fun. Beware of spoilers...
Hey Harry,
This past week I got a chance to see Dimension Films' new sci-fi/action thriller "Equilibrium" starring Christian Bale, Taye Diggs, Emily Watson, William Fichter, and Angus McFayden. The audience at the theater was mostly people ages 17-30, and producer Jan de Bont was seated in the back from the beginning to end. As a side note, even though the film was called "Equilibrium" on the preview invitations, the guy who introduced the movie and the main titles on the workprint both called it "Defender". In my opinion, "Equilibrium" is a much better title and actually has something to do with the movie, while "Defender" makes it sound like a direct-to-video movie. The movie is about a utopian society where no one is allowed to feel. All books, music, artwork, and movies have been banned and destroyed.
To stop people from feeling, everyone must take a special drug at different points of the day. As in every movie or book about utopias, there is always a group of people that don't follow the rules and rebel. Like the firemen of "Fahrenheit 451", there are clericks in the society whose job it is to arrest and/or kill anyone who is feeling or who has possession of any banned materials. Christian Bale plays John Preston, the head clerick who is trained in a form of martial arts involving guns. Throughout the movie, he and the other clericks travel outside the main gates of the city to kill the rebels living in abandoned buildings and shacks. When his partner (played by Sean Bean) is killed for reading poetry, Preston is assigned Taye Diggs as his new partner. Also like in "Fahrenheit 451", Preston begins to question his role in the society, and stops taking his drugs. He starts seeing that preventing people from feeling is wrong, and attempts to put a stop to it by joining the rebel underground led by William Fichter.
Now that I've discussed the plot, I'm going to talk about the main aspect of the movie that will be the only cause for people to see it: The action scenes. The action scenes are basically clones of scenes from the Matrix (there's a training fight between Christian Bale and Taye Diggs very similar to the one between Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne, the shootouts all involve slow motion martial arts and gunplay, a shootout at the end takes place in a room that looks a lot like the lobby from the Matrix). However, they are still really cool looking and will leave a smile on your face.
Even though I heard people complaing about the similarities between this and Matrix, that didn't stop the whole theater from cheering every time Christian Bale whipped out two pistols from up his sleeve and firing them, while at the same time running up a wall and kicking the shit out of people.
!!!SPOILER WARNING!!!
And by the way, there is a sword fight in the end that would be one of the coolest death scenes ever had it not been almost fully copied from Thirteen Ghosts.
SPOILER END
While this movie totally lacks originality, I still thought that it was still pretty cool and a lot of fun. While it won't get good ratings from the critics, and probably won't make a lot of money, I'd say its a good way to waste two hours of your life.
-Unaverage Joe
