![]() But in no time he is feeling joy and love, and because he is the hero, this must be good, even though his replacement partner, Cleric Brandt ( Taye Diggs), suspects him, and wants to expose him. In an early scene Cleric Preston blow-torches the 'Mona Lisa,' the one painting you can be pretty sure most moviegoers will recognize. It argues, if I am correct, that it is good to feel passion and lust, to love people and desire them, and to experience voluptuous pleasure through great works of music and art. What I like is the sneaky way Kurt Wimmer's movie advances its philosophy in between gun battles. The dispassionate observer such as myself, refusing to Sense Offense my way through such scenes, can nevertheless admire them as a technical exercise. They seem to have been assembled for victims of Attention Deficit Syndrome, who are a large voting block at the box office these days. There are a lot more similar battles, which are pure kinetic energy, made of light, noise and quick cutting. There is nothing about this scene that even attempts to be plausible, confirming a suspicion I have long held, that the heroes of action movies are protected by secret hexes and cannot be killed by bullets. A violent gun battle breaks out, jerkily illuminated by flashes of the guns, and everyone is killed but Preston. As nearly as I could tell, he is in the middle of the floor, surrounded by Offenders with guns. There is an opening sequence in which Preston and Partridge approach an apartment where Offenders are holed up, and Preston orders the lights to be turned out in the apartment. That would seem to be cheating, and involves a lot of extra work (it is much easier to shoot someone without doing a back-flip), but since the result is loud and violent it is no doubt worth it. The fighters transcribe the usual arcs in mid-air and do impossible acrobatics, but mostly use guns instead of fists and feet. More rounds of ammunition are expended in this film than in any film I can remember, and I remember " The Transporter." I learn from Nick Nunziata at that the form of battle used in the movie is "Gun-Kata," which is "a martial art completely based around guns." I credit Nunziata because I think he may have invented this term. If "Equilibrium" has a plot borrowed from 1984, Brave New World and other dystopian novels, it has gunfights and martial arts borrowed from the latest advances in special effects. Knowing that, but remembering Mary, he deliberately stops taking his Prozium: He loves being a Cleric, but, oh, you id. His duties bring him into contact with Mary O'Brien ( Emily Watson), and he feels-well, it doesn't matter what he feels. He has kept it, he explains, to better understand the enemy (the same reason censors have historically needed to study pornography). We see him pocketing a book that turns out to be the collected poetry of W.B. Preston is a top operative, but is hiding something. "I didn't feel anything," he replies, and we believe him, although perhaps this provides a clue about his wife's need to Offend. Nobody can look dispassionate in the face of outrageous provocation better than Bale, and he proves it here after his own wife is incinerated for Sense Offenses. If you believe you have the right to kill someone because of your theology, you are going about God's work in your way, not His.Ĭhristian Bale stars in "Equilibrium," as Cleric John Preston, partnered with Partridge ( Sean Bean) as a top-level enforcer. This is a rich irony, since True Believers, not Free Thinkers, are the ones eager to go to war over their beliefs. (Hint: The working title of this movie was "Librium.") In the movie, enforcers known as Clerics have the mandate to murder those who are considered Sense Offenders. To assure world peace and the survival of the human race, everyone has been put on obligatory doses of Prozium, a drug that dampens the emotions and shuts down our sensual side. They got all worked up and started bombing each other. That war was caused, it is believed, because citizens felt too much and too deeply. The movie is set in the 21st century-hey! that's our century!-at a time after the Third World War.
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