Equilibrium

Year or release : 2002

 

Run time : 1h47min

 

Genre : Sci Fi / Action

 

Cast : Christian Bale, Taye Diggs, Sean Bean, William Fichtner

 

Written / Directed by Kurt Wimmer

 

 

The action takes place in a totalitarian state after the Third World War, when the ones in power decided people's ability to feel leads to war and they should be made unable to feel and have no possessions.

Feeling is deemed a crime and the ones who feel, sense offenders. They are put to death by being burnt alive.

 

The world people live in now is bleak, without any color, the buildings are all grey, inside and out, they all wear a blue navy color uniform, their desks look the same, so do their houses which have only the necessary things in, like the bed only with a mattress, without covers or a pillow, the windows are covered in a white wallpaper so they can't see outside, there's no furniture, just the table with chairs and the dishes,and the tv for the propaganda.

 

The kids are indoctrinated to rat on their parents, there's this fear of each other ,of your own family.

Any precious and valuable items are searched and destroyed, from books to paintings ( they burn the original Mona Lisa).

 

Also, people inject themselves a few times a day in the neck with Prozium, a serum which makes them unable to feel, turning them into robots.

 

John Preston ,the lead of the movie, is a grammaton cleric, the highest rank in the state, under the president. The president is called 'the father'.

 

The grammaton cleric is the arm of the law which is trained in martial arts and the gun kata, and also trained to know what people are thinking, and feeling.

 

The movie starts with a raid, in which Preston single-handedly k!lls the members of the resistance by blowing up the bulbs and k!lling them all in the dark!

He sees his partner took one of the books the resistance had, and realizes he's a 'sense offender',a person who feels, just like the members of the resistance. So he k!lls him.

 

After this, he is changed, and he stopped taking his daily dose, first by accident, then on purpose, and comes to understand what they do, k!lling people for the sole reason of having feelings is wrong.

 

SPOILERS

He becomes from the enforcer of the insane rules to the liberator ,taking down the dictatorship.

 

This is one of my favorite movies. I loved the change in Preston from the enforcer of the totalitarian rules, who believed what he did was right, k!lling people for feeling, because there were no wars anymore due to their rules, to the liberator of society, taking down the government.

 

I loved to slowly see the change in him, how he slowly started questioning the world he lived in. He started from tearing down the wallpaper covering his window, to saving a dog and fighting his solders, k!lling them, for the dog's life, to becoming an important part of the resistance, and freeing the people.

 

As he starts changing, we see he dreams at night about how his wife was taken away from him and burnt alive for the crime of loving him! Since he wasn't the one who rat her out, he discovers the state had its eye on him ever since, four years before the action takes place.

 

The wife was played by two actresses with similar features, as we see her in the dream sequence and in the video of her incineration looking different, and even at the end, there's two names ,which makes me  wonder if this was done on purpose,because there are no photos allowed anymore, they don't exist, so that's how he remembers her looking, and in the video is how she really looked,which I thought was a nice touch,as memory is a tricky thing,without an image to remember someone by,we forget their features,and don't remember them correctly or exactly. (Apparently they couldn't find the original actress..)

 

The soundtrack by Klaus Badelt was amazing, and merges with the scenes, with the inner changes / struggle happening to the character. There's this scene when he finally decides ( on the inside) what side he's on, and the music as he's fighting the ones in who's team he was supposed to be on is like catharsis with the choirs..it's poetic.

 

The movie has amazing fighting scenes.

 

The movie is streaming on DirecTv, HBO Max, Netflix, and is for rent or sale on Amazon, Apple, AMC on Demand, Google Play, Microsoft Store, Redbox, Vudu, YouTube.

 

Rating : The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of!