Equilibrium: Elimination of Everything That Inspires Us

Hello everybody!
Today’s review is of Christian Bale’s gunkata SciFi/dystopian film Equilibrium.

EQUILIBRIUM

TITLE: Equilibrium

DIRECTOR: Kurt Wimmer

STARRING: Christian Bale, Emily Watson, Taye Diggs

GENRE: Science Fiction

YEAR: 2002

COUNTRY: United States

Equilibrium focuses on the story of John Preston (Christian Bale), a cleric in the military of Libria. Libria is a city-state led by the Tetragrammaton Council along with the figurehead “Father” (Sean Pertwee). The world has been ravaged by the “Third World War” and all emotionally stimulating content will be confiscated and torched. All citizens take a drug, known as Prozium, that supresses emotions. When John Preston realizes how important emotions are to humans and society, he takes the matter into his own hands.

Equilibrium is a very interesting film to boot, but the film is best known for its over the top fight scenes featuring gun kata. Christian Bale’s character is a cleric which is a high ranking military officer that has mastered the art of gun kata. They are the main officers who are in charge who apprehending emotionally stimulating items. This gives Equilibrium some very impressive fight scenes, mainly Christian Bale murdering a bunch of people with martial arts and guns. Honestly, Christian Bale is also pretty awesome with a sword too, shown at the end of the film. You can see the explanation of gun kata below, straight from the film:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mAH_6V5h4c]

Equilibrium is a fun and interesting film about the dangers of emotions and influence on society and individuals in general. The best part of Equilibrium are the insanely cool fight scenes, but I covered those already. Christian Bale isn’t half bad in it as well, Bale plays a character without emotions pretty well. I hate to compare him, but he was acting like Kristen Stewart in all of her movies. At least he was doing a decent job. The plot actually is somewhat interesting, I figured it would be since they burn the Mona Lisa in the first major scene.

Unfortunately, Equilibrium is far from perfect. The villains in Equilibrium are absolutely boring. I mean, the only good villain is his replacement partner. It is made pretty clear early on that he is out for Bale’s position and his head. He isn’t even that subtle about it. The best thing is he gets murdered violently in the third act. Oh sorry about that, ***SPOILERS***

PROS:

• John Preston’s character arc.
• Nice CGI and VFX
• Gun Kata!
• Likely scenario for a distopia.

CONS:

• Boring Antagonists.
• Lackluster story.
• Isn’t a Cleric a healer?

SCORE: 7.0 / 10

If you have any suggestions for films/TV/Games/Music for me to review, drop me a comment!

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