Fox and Talen (leechimera) wrote, @ 2009-07-02 13:05:00

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Equilibrium Review (Talen Head)
One of the important things I see a reviewer being able to do is combat factual misconceptions. Thanks to a review - of sorts - I learned how one would most appropriately cut through jail bars, how the weather actually works, and whether or not Ben Stiller is in fact a strategically shaved monkey. It is therefore with something of a heavy heart that I must take up my pen and scribe my thoughts about the movie Equilibrium, because I've made no secret that I think the movie is bad.

When I criticize such a beast, however, the immediate thing I find said about it by people who agree with me is that the movie ripped off The Matrix, so I feel I need to address this error before I approach my actual griefs with the movie, in the interest of padding my word count and legitimizing my opinion. After all, if I disliked it because it was a Matrix knock-off, my opinion looks like it's part of a herd.

The three year gap between the release of Matrix and Equilibrium might be, in some people's minds, short enough to allow a full knock-off to be written, developed, shot, and created. On the other hand, it's much more likely that Equilibrium was in production well beforehand, and the success of Matrix let it be pushed forward - as would be germaine, with the two having similar styles. They don't have much overlap once you push past the most superficial elements:

• An unlikeable protaganist.
• Trench coats.
• An awesome underutilised actor.
• Retarded use of firearms.
When you strip away these comparisons, the two movies can stand proud and free of one another, as what they are. On the one hand, you have The Matrix, which was a pop-culture sandwich that played on vast number of previous cinematographical historical events and reintroduced eastern cinematics to western audiences, and on the other hand, you have Equilibrium, which is shit.

Oh, it's not particularly bad shit. It's the kind of shit you get when you've been eating bran for a while, the kind of shit you find after a long period of worry about the state of your digestive tract. It's the kind of shit you're slightly glad to have, because even if it is you inspecting your shit, its presence indicates you're at least reasonably healthy. It's the natural byproduct you get of a healthy system, a collection point for ideas and cinematics that served their purpose elsewhere and are now collected in one place for easy disposal.

That is the worst paragraph that I have ever written, and I apologise to you all.

Equilibrium is a 2002 action film directed by Kurt Wimmer, a man blessed with a name that's distinctive but also not attached to anything else, which means there's no massive bandwagon of expectations to attach to his work. It's a real shame when a person creates an artwork that deals with interesting and creative themes that is then dismissed for being too much like X and then simultaneously not enough like X. It's under this shadow that Equilibrium falls for me, but the X in this case is not The Matrix. It's 1984.

Now, part of the problem Equilibrium suffers is that it's an Action Film. Not an Action Film, or a film in the Action Genre, an Action Film. If you ask a proponent of Action Films exactly what they think of any particular Action Film is, do you know what the most common adjective used to describe these Action Films is?

Brainless.

That's right. There's a whole subgenre, which is almost the whole of the genre itself, where even its proponents laud its successful ability to entertain them when they don't engage their brains. Now, to these people, this is a selling point. I'm sure you know these people. I'm sure, time to time, I'm one of these people. But Action Films are built around the promotion and acceptance of cinema which is generally designed to not need to make sense. What does that make them, then? A kind of mentalistic masturbation. And the thing is, Equilibrium may have some pretension towards being an Action Film, or a Film With Action, but it doesn't live up to the standard of an actual movie with a story and a point. It's not. Not even through all its sweaty, lathered-up belabouring of its supposed-points and its attempts at cleverness does Equilibrium successfully engage the brain. Instead, it does what these brainless Action Films do - it takes the moment of emotional sting one gets from a well-delivered piece of actual storytelling, strips away as much of it as it can and then forces it into place in the story (choose your own cynical reasoning for this methodology). It's like a comedy routine made entirely out of punchlines, because developing plot points and character and scenes is too much work.

Instead we get a genre built around stereotypes, where the reader is presumed to know exactly how things should work (because it's an Action Film), so the author can proceed with the snappy one-liners and the biting comebacks without having to justify them. It is incredibly easy writing to do, with an increase in the special effects budget is able to decrease proportionally the amount of work the scriptwriter does. By the way, for the real agent representeur of the Action Film genre, you need look no further than Michael Bay's work.

The thing with Action Films is that they just don't bear up under scrutiny. You can't really analyse them or try to challenge them or explore what they mean because the resounding reveberation you will hear is the hollowness of the piece, and any attempts to discuss it with fans of the piece will be met with It's an Action Movie, as if that explains anything.

With my postulate about the Action Film and its hideousness as it relates to the movie laid out, I'll try and sweep the excessive comparisons to the Matrix away and instead focus on the story, genre, and character elements that make this movie a Bad Movie. If you want to skip past that - which would be weird, but after that paragraph about poo, I can understand if you, as a reader don't trust me to not gross you out for no good reason, just jump down to the phrase Poseur Tenue to hear the last of my words on the matter.

The first grand problem I have with the movie of Equilibrium is in the plot itself. The world is inspired by 1984, where instead of intense societal control and a monolithic, inexplicable entity that promotes a feeling of helplessness, the writers decided that they'd instead lean on a far more sensible and easily implemented plan of every single person in a city drugging themselves up with self-subjugating mind-fucking drugs, every day, multiple times a day, all on time like clockwork.

Now, one of the important things when you write stories are that people should always be people. In a sci-fi story, you have a lot of leeway - you can introduce some very odd things and provided you do it early enough, making them part of the setting, viewers will accept it. The important issue is how people react to those fantastical elements. Therefore, provided you introduce something which keeps people as people, you should be fine.

Prozium broke that rule for me.

You have a city of what, ten thousand people? A hundred thousand? In a city, with an inefficient delivery systems of this wonder-drug, you have a whole population who will go so far as to stop in the street and immediately inject their necks with something. Nobody is late. Nobody is early. Nobody rushes, and apparently, dropping your Prozium is so rare an event as to make a fucking movie about it.

You can say the point of the drug was to erase individuality, but the thing is, it didn't. People still had individual tastes and colourisations and manners, they just didn't act on it a lot. If nothing else, there were black people. Prozium rings hollow to me because I don't see any operation on that scale being feasible. If the drug was in the water, in the air, if it was delivered by some easy method like doping the food, then I find it more tolerable. But instead, the writers chose to use the device of several thousand people performing in lock-step unity, a single action of unnecessary complexity.

Injection based drugs are delivered by injection because it speeds their absorption, or because the drug is based on a biological compound that the body would break down, like steroids. When you have a population of thousands who are engaged regularly in the comission of self-medication, surely, in-universe, you can devise more appropriate ways to do it, especially when the drug already strongly resembles the effects you can get from existing digestable drugs?

I can tell why the author wanted the device of the injection, of course. The methodology in question means that there's more means for a manual failure (dropping the Prozium), that the sequence is more horrific (a room full of people stuffing a needle into their necks is pretty nasty), and to make it feasible for a complete incompetent like John Preston to fall out of the simple norms by dint of a mere accident that could happen to any hoof-handed blitherer. On the other hand, that any hoof-handed blitherer could fuck up his prozium dose does kinda highlight my problem with the delivery method, especially when you consider that while Libria is treated at times like a city, it is more than that treated as a world. Humanity is capable of sustaining massive levels of industrial production, high levels of extremely sophisticated technology, populating cities and regularly scourging the world outside of the domain of the Clerics with aims to destroying anything that can make people feel (which is going to be tricky what with the sun setting and all that), yet it's somehow small enough to routinely supply in a breathtakingly inefficient way that involves giving everyone personal freedom, content in the knowledge that this utopia is supported on the backs of everyone who isn't clumsy.

This is what I mean by Action Films. The premises underlying the setting are potentially very interesting and clever. You could do a great story about a world with that kind of dogmatic, fascist, societal control. But that would involve a great deal of nuance and an understanding of people and howe they react to social pressure and control. Equilibrium can't handle that, it needs to minimize time spent thinking about things so it instead jumps to relying on a magical maguffin in order to support its world. It then throws off that magical maguffin and we're supposed to be impressed.

Part of the horror of 1984 is that people would embrace the lifestyle if you make them afraid enough. The horror was based around the idea that actual people would act this way, that a real society could be transformed into Big Brother's world. The world of Equilibrium is instead a magical world, where the transformative power of a wonder drug takes care of all that messy business and tells you you should be scared, because provided we overcome the total ridiculousness of distributing and enforcing this drug's use, any place might be like this. This brings to mind the image of someone trying to emulate the level of creeping horror of Psycho by putting a man in a dress and having him yell 'Boo.'

So, the setting sucks.

I don't like John Preston. I think I'm well-rounded enough to recognise that my dislike of John Preston is not wholly due to his grim-jawed gravel-voiced stoic untouchability. I know someone who would probably want John Preson to take him roughly. I know that sex appeal can happily distil and set aside elements of a character that people dislike, and while I want to say that John Preston is a bad character acted badly, I'm not so sure I can draw that line too simply. I know that Christian Bale can act, so I can't attribute his performance to incompetence - which means somewhere along the line, the conscious choice was made to make John Preston the protaganist of this story - a man with only one skill who is treated by the story as an everyman of every capability. A highly-trained, exceptional individual who somehow lacks even the most basic of abilities that don't result in and extend to the art of killing people. He's required to interrogate people yet demonstrates no ability to follow social cues, or follow good, efficient interrogation methods. Another element of the Action Film set up. A real interrogation sequence is very different to the kind you see here, with a lot of established behaviours based on years of understanding human psychology. Since that's too complex to deal with, we instead get to see Preston fumble his way through conversations where he really shouldn't be there. A human interrogator gives a human edge to an inhuman society with inhuman practices. I could nitpick further (why can Preston send people out of the room? This guy is allowed to murder people, what is he afraid of them witnessing), but all I'm really doing is skirting the major issue: John Preston is a very simple character that the story treats as if he's complex.

Part of the problem is the setting. The setting relies on a system where deliberately socially retarded people are required to, nay selected to conduct investigations of other human beings to try and root out people who are guilty of thought crime. The setting can't maintain its own premise because no thought was put into doing so. Why? Action Film. It doesn't need an explanation, it doesn't need to make sense. It doesn't need verisimillitude, because the whole thing is written as if the people who are here to enjoy the story are going to do so without thinking about it. They're not going to mind if a plot point surfaces and vanishes in a heartbeat, because all that plot point is there to do is to set up the next cutting one-liner, the next stoic jaw-set, the next mechanical stunt.

It seems as the movie goes on that the theme the writers were striving to represent with John is any one man can change the world. This is a theme that's been touched upon quite a bit, and it's quite heartwarming especially when you fail to pay any attention to the events around it. Any one man can change the world, provided that man is a terrifying unmitigated bullet-shitting ubermensch who cannot be harmed and is surrounded on all hands by people who are willing to overcome the fact that he is nothing but a singleminded killing device. Preston's children save his ass, Preston's allies in the resistance actually execute the demolition, Father makes sure 'Preston's' plan succeeds, Preston's buddy Brandt further facilitates Father's plan... and in the end, you instead wind up with one man who is an unreasonably good murderer who is being treated like he's the messiah, as though he has some moral character or special ability that makes him more useful to the plot than any other hoof-fingered authority who could drop his Prozium.

With the idea that the protaganist is bad because of the story but not because of himself, we have to consider the bad guy's big plan. Dupont's plan borders on near-omniscience and displays a completely omnipresent sense of understanding about people that he he has established, previously, would be out of keeping with the taking of Prozium. This type of big, extensive plan is often known as a Xanatos Gambit, after the Gargoyles villain Xanatos. A Xanatos Gambit, in essence, is a plan where it's as bad (or worse) for the hero if he succeeds as if he fails. To be fair to that definition, the Xanatos Gambit isn't quite appropriate to Equilibrium, because Dupont's plan does nothing if John fails except get a perfectly good Tetragrammatron cleric killed. On the other hand, all they're good for, it seems, is killing large groups of people who are incompetent with firearms.

The problem with this type of scheme - well, one of them - is that it ultimately induces large amounts of futility in the audience's investment in the hero. Anything the hero did that worked out in the end (yes, killing lots and lots of cops and innocent people) was all just part of the villain's plan. And in the cause of Equilibrium, there is no real set-up for the twist. There's just the twist, which leaps out from behind the curtain, as is germaine to Action Films. Rather than develop things and explore things, explain and expand on them, the movie realises it's painted itself into a corner where the villain can be seen as a complete cretin (and John's own record of cretinism nearly broken by him helping someone competent with a competent plan), and decides to have said villain leap up on his chair to proudly proclaim "Nuh-uh! I wanted you to do that!" Not very satisfying.

To have this happen, and then have this near-omniscient super-baddy fail to do something as basic as search John for weapons before engaging in some totally inessential gloating which gives John a chance to cut sick, kill everyone in the room, move to another room, kill everyone in that room in some choreographed nonsense with firearms, then move to another room, kill everyone in that room then have to start considering bringing other Tetragrammaton clerics into the issue... I'm getting ahead of myself. The plan shares a failing with most conspiracy theories, which is to presume a super-capable group of shadwoy figures with amazing predictive abilities who nonetheless fuck up so simply as to let a crazed taxi cab driver have all the information necessary to bring them down. Capable of orchestrating an amazing plan but not smart enough to just shoot John in the head the second he outlived his usefulness, Dupont is a wonderful strawman for the Action Film trope that People who plan are stupid, and can be bested by just punching them in the face enough. Far be it from me to claim that the genre I deride is written by anti-intellectual polemics - I think these films are written by marketing departments who cynically recognise that few things make Joe Average feel quite as good as watching someone who he can identify with kicking someone smart in the teeth. That'll teach him for being smart.

This prescience wedded to idiocy makes Dupont's confession at the end that he isn't on Prozium even more baffling. It does, however, serve to cleanse any conscience one might have for the man who was, really, just pursuing the propoganda laid down by Father. In that one confession we see nothing of Dupont's character that has been predicted before this point, and nothing is done by the revelation except to shift him from smarmy jerk to smarmy hypocritical jerk. This very firmly shifts the moral onus of the movie onto Preston, and removes even the faintest shard of complexity the movie might have had. Preston's actions are good because he's the good guy, Dupont's are bad because he's the bad guy. Ignore that Preston has murdered probably hundreds since getting his emotions back and seems to feel no remorse. Feel? Feelings? Remember? the point of the movie?

At this point we have to touch on the final part of the movie that really shits me, and given what a mammoth this review is at this point I figure it's best to not gild the lily. Equilibrium has one of the most consistantly retarded depictions of firearms in any movie I've ever seen, ever. Gun Kata is the kind of lathered up penis-substitution worship that sounds cool when you're twelve, sounds neat when you're explaining it to a focus group of idiots, and can support a whole movie only if you don't have to deal with issues like the fact that guns don't work that way, martial arts don't work that way, sound doesn't work that way, and physics don't work that way. It is the epitome of Action Film idiocy, and to make it an institutionalised martial art with its own adherents and supposed masters just serves to underscore and emphasise how little this movie wants you to think about the things it's showing you.

It's almost a footnote at this point to complain that Sean Bean was underutilised in his appearance. Poseur Tenue aside, Equilibrium was a bad movie caught up so intensely with the idea of appearing clever that it never successfully did anything clever. Nothing but a cardboard cutout standing in for the depth it wanted to have, it's the whiny kid in high school who liked to compare himself to Haulden Caulfield and rubbish on all the popular kids, not realising why he's a classic literary character. The matrix ripped off the Bible, Equilibrium ripped off 1984, so I actually expect far better of Equilibrium. On the other hand, if you're looking for a brainless Action Film, you can watch this and feel slightly cleverer than the people who prefer other, seemingly-stupider Action Films.

(Anonymous) 2009-07-02 06:24 (link)

Wow, that was fairly brutal! And actually, I think you’re probably right on all counts. This raises a new question for me (and also one for you, but I’ll get to that). Why is it, then, that if I’m prepared to accept all your points did I enjoy the movie the couple of times I watched it, and why do I still remember it fondly now? A couple of things spring to mind. Firstly, it may be that when I squint and look sideways at it I think that, although it signally fails to achieve the things it purportedly set out to achieve, the fact that it set out to achieve them in the first place elevates it above other action films for me. I guess the question here might be, can you actually make “1984: the Action Movie” without compromising? Secondly, there is the thought that maybe the coherence of the plot is not such a big factor for me in terms of my enjoying a movie or not. Maybe I prioritise other things, such as the ‘coolness’ of the action sequences (And yes, sorry, I thought Gun Kata was cool.) , or scenes that make me feel (Again, sorry, but the moment where he first feels something when he sees the sun really got me.) or snappy dialogue (Okay, maybe not in this particular movie.). To illustrate: the actual details of the plot may be subordinate to the actual details of the setting which is why I’ll happily take The Phantom Menace over, oh I don’t know, The Chronicles of Riddick? Maybe that’s why I prefer science fiction and fantasy to soap operas; I don’t necessarily need my plots to hang together, I just need them to push certain buttons. That’s why I’ll happily take the likes of Doctor Who (Loooove that dialogue!) over Eastenders or Neighbours, say. Okay, now my question to you. Do you consider all action films to be brainless, worthless rubbish? Or: are you measuring action films against a different metric? I mean if Equilibrium is slightly cleverer than other action films and is still terrible, then you have to conclude that either they’re all rubbish, or that being clever is not a quality they need. In which case it might be helpful if you could provide an example of what you consider a good, or even excellent, action film and, more importantly, why it’s so good. Simon (Reply to this) (Thread)

leechimera 2009-07-02 06:57 (link)

I don't think that the Acion film genre is all brainless Action Films, hence the use of the capitalization and boldfacing. I think, purely off the top of my head that Pitch Black, Die Hard, Die Hard With A Vengeance and The Matrix were all good Action films which didn't rely on being brainless and an audience willing to stop paying attention to what was going on. Die Hard With A Vengeance is probably the best Action film I think I've ever seen, with a huge amount of depth, characters who weren't simplified archetypes, and people attempting to solve problems in a very realistic way. The single best moment I can provide to give you an example is when Zeus approaches John McClane, who tries to state in a very understated, but pressured voice, that he's a cop and that Zeus should back off. Zeus didn't. Now, both sides had points, both sides had strengths to them, but one decided and acted, and things went out of their mutual control. There was not a defining, absolute perspective of one character being the Righty Whitey and the other being the Black Sidekick. Zeus was a character, with his own elements and his own problems. And yet? The movie was full of explosoins and had an elaborate plot that might not have necessarily made a ton of sense but still didn't collapse when you glanced at it sharply. The curious thing is, you claim that Soap operas appeal to you less than the fantastic, but that fantastic of which you speak is the stuff which is not the stuff that's all about getting you to feel. Any good art gets you to feel, one way or another. The thing that I think you're trying to get at is that you like feeling with some depth - you want to feel and that fantasy and sci-fi can often withdraw a person from that humdrum scenario of the soap opera and instead put you in a place where that's all melted away and your only connected point to the character is that line of sensation. Now, all that being said, just because it's a bad movie doesn't mean you can't enjoy it. Heck, doesn't mean you shouldn't enjoy it. I think that we all have vices in our tastes, in that we tend to like and enjoy things that are bad for us, and this movie is bad for you in that it can, at a superficial blush, get you to start thinking about some things. But only once the movie is over - if you actually think about things within the context of the movie, it all kinda just crumbles in on itself. It's a movie designed with a lot of potential in its premise, and its execution is awful. In that regard, it's definitely a step up from 12 Rounds and a very big step up from Wolverine's Big Movie. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	leechimera 2009-07-02 06:59 (link)
	Sod, all that came without its paragraph markers. My fault for using some HTML. Whoops. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

(Anonymous) 2009-07-02 07:32 (link)

A couple of points there to pick up on. Firstly, I think you've touched a nerve about my wanting to feel something removed from the normal experience. One of the things I like about science fiction (as opposed to sci-fi which isn't always the same thing) is it's ability to construct a what-if scenario in order to make you think about and feel something about a situation that may never come up in ordinary life. A case in point might be the novel "Day of the Triffids" (I say novel, because I now you're not well disposed to the BBC adaptation). John Wyndham takes the initial doomsday scenario and then extrapolates in detail all the ramifications for surviving the aftermath and rebuilding civilisation. I'm tempted to call 28 Days Later a poor movie because it doesn't look at the ramifications too deeply, but maybe that's doing it an injustice. To summarise: that kind of situation is more interesting to me than whether character A is going to find out that character B has had an affair with character C. It takes a lot more involvement and depth to make that situation interest me. As for enjoying Equilibrium despite its faults, a further thought has occurred to me. It's possible that the mere fact that it wasn't the cheap, tatty Matrix rip-off that I was expecting predisposed me favourably towards it in such a way that I could overlook the faults you've highlighted. I've seen rip-offs of other classics and the fact that most of them were dire meant that Equilibrium already had a leg up on them. I wonder why it is that the movie Cars, which also has dire problems if you consider the concept too closely, is so much better/more enjoyable/easier too forgive? I know you're a fan so I'd be interested in your thoughts because, well, deep down, if cars are people- what happens when a mummy car and a daddy car love each other very much... for example. Simon. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)