Review of Equilibrium (2002) by Ld3 — 11 Jun 2015

Q: 'What's the purpose of life without emotion?'

The answer is a lesson in senseless plagiarism, a hodgepodge collage of the worst bits ripped from diverse sources such as Frank Herbert's seminal 1966 "The The Eyes of Heisenberg", Orwell's quintessential "1984" and others, that neither moves, antagonizes, entertains nor challenges the viewer in any way.

Taking place in some futuristic communist society, some desk occupying "Grammar Druid"- has a job to do: search and destroy every article that can be associated with art and bring to justice the proprietors. Art is bad because art provokes emotions and emotions lead to anger and anger leads to the dark side and war, as we're all familiar with the Bhagavad-Gita ("From attachment desire arises, from desire anger is born; from anger comes confusion" etc.). What is "art" though? Is it beauty? No. That would conflict with the vanity mirrors, statues, architecture and other things of beauty appearing in the movie.

Luckily for us the movie has a simple answer to make it easier on our feverish minds: "art" is conveniently identifiable and distinguishable by color. Because, of course nothing that's either black nor white can constitute art, and can therefore stir emotions- ergo anything color is art! In the year 2072, in an unsaturated future, human beings have devolved out of capability to emotionally interact with objects colored either black or white. So in conclusion: black and white- fine, color- bad. That's what they teach you in druid camp. Also luckily- people, dressed or not- don't stir emotions, as well as things such as sunsets or stubbing the pinky toe... so the risk lies with the two following groups: 1.) Knick-knacks. 2.) Puppies. One must shoot those puppies dead real good, especially colored ones, because puppies evoke parental EMOTIONS, and before you know it puppies=WW4, but I'm running ahead of myself with the anti-puppy agenda and parentalism... I'll get back to that soon.

Unfortunately, the problem of "defining art" is but a symptom of a much deeper problem. You see, barring art and beauty, the depicted world should have been stripped to the bone from every aspect which is not purely functional: all men and women with buzz cuts, no makeup, no tanning or color industry etc. However, and this is the main point- that spartan functionality should have been captured by the cinematography and music as well, so absolutely no stylish shooting and no evocative music until that very moment where the protagonist first starts to feel! perhaps even monochromatic shooting until that very moment, after which you allow color to start "leaking in" or entirely saturate reality, depending on your directorial interpretation. The dissonance between "WHAT you're told" about the world versus "the MEANS by which you're being told" shows total misunderstanding of the craft. So much could and should have been done with this.

Moving on... aided by the arcane knowledge of such mystic ways as "Statistics" and "Way of Chuck Norris" which distinguish him from his unlearned aim-to-miss colleagues- nothing and no one can stand in the way of our hero on his path of cold and uninteresting destruction. You can make a good short film about the inverse ratio between the effort put in the elaborate Gun-Fu moves and the viewers interest.

In order to become a more efficient law-enforcer our hero takes a kind of emotion suppressing drug. Sure- all people do in this film, however there's a specific reason why it's of paramount importance that our druid takes his pills- that's because we soon enough discover that the drug also raises his IQ from negative eleventeen to that of a functional person! We know that because at a certain point the druid stops taking the drug and goes full retard. From that point onward every single action he takes throughout the movie makes you cringe (a homage to Carl Reiner's 1979 film "The Jerk"). This is important because this issue in the plot is strengthened later when his 4 y/o son, being evidently aware of his father's non-drug-enhanced natural cognitive limitations- rescues him.

One must wonder how in a situation when feelings are suppressed- babies' survival mechanism come into play, and how they can therefore coerce parental protection and nurturing. Sparta has nothing on this, yet our druids son seems to take the reasonable and understanding way, and thus assist his dumb father in shattering the foundations of their common reality.

How to write an idiot into a hero? The inventive way with which this sensitive topic is dealt with here is by A:) Chuck Norris-ing our hero, and B:) Use the old trope of the master-plan revealing, ill-prepared arch-villain "FU-TH-UR", perhaps the spouse of the Nostromo's "MU-TH-UR 6000" computer (chronologically it makes perfect sense).

If you can stand the boredom of the cliché-riddled and predictable story, I highly recommend it to learners of cinema for its bonanza of "things NOT to do".