Equilibrium - the movie (all spoilers)

Cafe Society
1

Finally watched the movie. Okay.

First, gun kata. Stupid, silly, preposterous. Okay, when he’s standing in the midst of 6 or 8 guys and quickly spins and swings his arms to shoot them without them getting him, maybe. Thin premise for the initial scene in the dark. Rather ridiculous for the climactic charge through the gauntlet.

More stupid - when he’s in the midst of “bad guys” and dealing with them, he ends up shooting each person 6 or 8 times. It’s overkill. They should be going down with the first blast through their chests. I mean, we see blasts coming out their backs.

Climax fight. He goes through the gauntlet. Fun shooting scene as cleanly as the Matrix run. Then he walks into the final room. He looks at the two guys at the desk, enters the room, and then lots of people come out from behind the columns around the room and suddenly he’s surrounded by a dozen sword-bearing guards. But the columns circle the room, including two next to the doors he enters. The camera angle is from inside the room looking at him entering. From there, since we the audience can’t see the sword guys, he should be able to see them. At least on the two next to the doors, and a couple others probably as well. I know, done for dramatic effect on the viewer, but doesn’t work.

Then, he gets a sword and goes through the guards like butter. Neat. Whacks the next honcho into pieces. No sweat. Suddenly the big bad leader guy grabs his pistol and vaults past the desk to engage in hand to hand using the pistols. He drops the sword and picks up a pistol, and they karate chop each other with their guns trying to shoot each other within arms reach. ACK!!! Now I think it’s supposed to be the Director’s idea of an exciting gun duel between masters of the gun kata, but it’s just Wrong wrong wrong! First, they are way too close. You don’t want to fight with pistols within arm’s reach. Second, Christian Bale’s character drops a sword to grab a pistol. HELLO!! If you’re going to get within reaching distance, a Sword is a much more effective and useful weapon. One slice and the guy doesn’t have a pistol to shoot you, then a second slice and he doesn’t have a head to curse at you. Stupid stupid stupid.

Those elements make the execution of the film difficult.

Now for premise. The premise is that because of war and violence, society has given up feeling. They use drugs to maintain an emotionless state. Lots of the dialogue is about not feeling, not pretending to feel. Bale’s character makes a point of this in a couple places. So then, why does the Director have Taye Digg’s character smiling throughout? Watched the director commentary. He says he felt that having everyone be completely emotionless zombies would not have been an entertaining movie. But it’s his stupid premise! If he can’t believe it, why should the audience? Then he says that Digg’s smile is fake with no real pleasure or happiness or friendliness behind it, and that a fake empty smile is scarier than no smile. First, what is the point of a fake, emotionless smile? The point of a fake smile is to pretend you have feelings so the smiler’s audience gets the social message of a smile. But they as a society have given up feelings, so there’s no point to convince someone else you are pleased. Second, I don’t think the smile is empty. He isn’t being pleasant, but he’s practically gloating. Then there’s the scene where Bale turns the tide on him and he’s being hauled away, he’s yelling “Wait, I’m not feeling, he’s the one who’s feeling!” But he’s yelling, very urgently. That is emotion.

Even the chief bad guy, the leader of the society, is emoting in many of the scenes and encounters. The director claims that is to show the hypocrisy of the totalitarian system. Okay, I can sort of see how the guy in power can abuse his power. But the thing is, if the society is built around the law of compliance to the code, so one would think that the Grammaton Cleric who is trained to spot and report and arrest sense crime would recognize sense-crime in the leader. But that’s never addressed.

But it’s worse than that. There’s a scene at the beginning where the Father figure is making a speech about the importance of their system and the giving up of feelings to eliminate hate and war and violence. At the end of his speech, an audience gives a standing ovation. HELLO!!! It’s not a formality acknowledgement and recognition, it’s a jump to your feet and clap loudly and rapidly in agreement applause. That’s emotion right there.

Stupid director.

I will say Christian Bale does an excellent job.

Anybody else want to comment?

2

I agree with everything you said. I’d just like to add a few thoughts:

  1. If the only alternative to the totalitarian thought police is early-20th-Century English kitsch, give me the drugs.

  2. A puppy? He’s killing people left and right, and we’re supposed to care about a puppy?

  3. What a waste of William Fichtner!

  4. How, exactly, did he smuggle those guns in there at the end?

  5. Apparently, the drugs not only suppress your emotions, they also suppress your British accent. No wonder Sean Bean had to die - his drugs obviously weren’t working.

3

I find that with films such as this one, I can enjoy them much better when I view every scene as visual symbolism rather than a direct attempt at a realistic portrayal of what’s supposed to happen; the same way the sentence ‘he killed them all with his guns’ stands for (and in place of) the action, so does the film sequence. Just like the sentence is not actually what happens (like the word ‘apple’ is not actually an apple), the scene doesn’t need to be, either (except, of course, realistic portrayal is one of the scene’s goals). So this ‘realism’ critique is, I think, most often a misplaced one. The message was ‘he’s awesome and he kills bad guys and it looks really cool’, and that was transmitted clearly by what’s shown on the screen, and that’s all it’s intended to do, in my opinion. And the visuals, on which there was a clear emphasis in the film, were done very well, I think.

My main point of criticism is more that it’s just 1984 + Fahrenheit 451 + Brave New World, with an authoritarian governmental system, the burning of emotionally charged artefacts, and mood controlling drugs, plus some stylish fighting, without so much as a shred of originality.

4

I agree with everything that has been said and can add only one thing. It was really cool. It was a comicbook, nothing more.

5

I found it too dour, humorless, unoriginal and stupid to be much fun, even in a comic-book sense.

6

I watched it for free on TV. If I had to pay for it I might have a different opinion. I enjoyed it for what it was. Lots of comicbooky violence.

7

It looked cool. That’s all I expected. At least it was better than Ultraviolet.

8

I loved Ultraviolet! It, Equilibrium and Aeon Flux are the only recent movies I’ve seen that show a really stylish future.

Blade Runner - so much to answer for.

9

I saw it more as a symbolic movie, a morality play, rather than a straight SF flick, and I loved it. The ending especially, when Bale looks out over the chaos, violence and destruction and smiles…

10

Thank you. I always felt I was alone in my dislike for that movie.

11

I think there’s plenty of William Fichtner to go around.

Alas they are all terrible movies.

12

Yes but no. If he keeps the sword, the Big Bad can just keep away and shoot him. The pistol is mightier than the sword, always. But if they both have guns, fighting at range doesn’t advantage him, the master of gun kata - anybody can make a headshot from 10 feet. So it’s in his advantage to close range, where a normal pistol user is hosed… Except of course, the Big Bad knows gun kata too, cue slap-slap-bang fight

Also, you just cheapened me by forcing me to come-up with a bogus logical explanation. DUUUDE ! Rule of Cool ! *Equilibrium *and *Ultraviolet *are monuments to it. Don’t overthink them, don’t even think them. Just go “Woaaah ! Niiice !” and get on with your life :D.

13

Okay, do you have a problem if I charge you for the last hour of my life that I could have used for some productive and ultimately life-enhancing purpose, instead of following one TV Tropes link to the next and the next and … ? Because when I look back over my life on my deathbed and reflect on everything I could have done with that hour, I only hope you’ll be properly ashamed. ::gives the stinkeye::

14

“last hour”, lol. I used like 5 full days.

15

Nah, I don’t mind. Wasting people’s time is what I do :slight_smile:

16

Great, I’m very pleased for you. Now, if you don’t mind my being a bit short, I’m right in the middle of the ‘Hypocritical Humor’ page and then I think I’m going to check out ‘Hitchhiker Heroes’ or possibly ‘Reading the Stage Directions Out Loud.’

17

Great ! See you at 5 AM then. Incidentally, have you ever played Civilization ? :slight_smile:

18

1 cup Fahrenheit 451
1/2 cup Brave New World
a dash of The Giver

Bend with mixer. Batter will be lumpy. Pour into loaf pan and bake at 350F for 107 minutes.

19

I find the tvtropes page to be more trouble than the value it provides. It’s not that they don’t list patterns, it’s the way they do it. Every entry is cross-referenced with a half-dozen other entries minimum, which is fine if it is just a cross-reference. But the way the entries are written, you don’t understand one entry until you go look up two others, and each of those requires another two entries looked up in order to understand. It’s a geometric explosion of reading links all so you can understand what the original description is trying to tell you.

That, and apparently everything is a trope. It’s a trope when the good guy wins, it’s a trope when the bad guy wins, it’s a trope when the good guy kills the bad guy with a sword, it’s a trope when the good guy kills the bad guy with a gun, it’s a trope when the good guy wins but doesn’t kill the bad guy, it’s a trope when the good guy tries not to kill the bad guy but then is forced to kill the bad guy. Also, I was thinking a “trope” was a judgmental call about bad things that are done, but apparently even good writing is a trope. Meh.

Alessan said:

That actually makes sense to me. Bale’s character is originally a true believer. He does what he does because he thinks it is best, the right thing to do. Hunting down the subversives and all is okay, and if they are resisting then it is proper to shoot them. But this is during the time when he is beginning to feel, the drugs are wearing off and he’s getting emotional connection to the world. Now he can still justify hunting down the subversives because they are criminals, even though he is technically committing the same crime. But the dogs are being slaughtered just because they are there. They are alive, and that is their crime. And the thing is, puppies are cute. It’s inherent in human nature to look at baby animals and find them cute, and get an emotional bond that has no basis but cuteness. And he has no experience with this feeling, it is brand new to him, so it overwhelms him. It’s all he can do to make up some excuse that almost sounds plausible. But the puppy is part of his path of emotional connection. Without the puppy, he might not have found himself trying to save the people in the next hunt. It was a step in the process he had to overcome, and it happened with the puppy first, because the puppy was innocent.

Ah, the director actually answers this one. In previous scenes Bale had accompanied the leader guy back to “see Father” and had come through those rooms before. The metal detectors are behind the two guards you see at the next set of doors, which is where the handover of guns would occur. But he eventually cut those scenes for pacing of the movie, so we aren’t aware that the antechamber he is in is the room to hand over all weapons. So this is really a flaw in their security that they run the “test” on him before the zone where they collect his guns and search him. They ask him to hand over his weapon, and he gives them his sword, but they haven’t passed the metal detectors, which are by the next door. The director says they’re actually visible in the scene where the doors open.

Kobal2 said:

Within the context of the story, it almost makes sense. Except he’s standing there with the sword, so the bad guy grabs a pistol and then runs towards Bale. I guess he’s thinking he can use is gun kata skills to avoid the blade as well? Then there’s the fact that Bale is a master of gun kata. Shooting at him from 10 feet away won’t work, because he knows how to avoid it. Except wouldn’t another master of gun kata know what Bale would anticipate as the statistical location of the shot, so adjust where he shoots to compensate for the standard gun kata adjustment? It’s so recursive, it hurts.

I know, it’s not supposed to make sense, it’s supposed to be an excuse for a cool fight with karate and guns.

Okay, here’s another point. Fitchner’s character says they have already planted explosives at all the chemical manufacturers and supply points. They are just waiting for Father to be taken out, so they can blow everything up. He says if they can interrupt the flow of drugs for one day, human nature will take over. Well, if human nature is so powerful and they already have explosives in place, why don’t they just blow everything up? Why wait for Father to be killed? Oh, because Bale has to be a hero and have cool fights.

I did like one point by the director. He said that he hates it when the hero goes in and fights the bad guy and gets really beaten up before finally winning. He is recreating the fantasies of his childhood, where he wouldn’t get wounded and just bearly win, but rather he’d go in and slaughter everyone without a scratch and win big. So that’s what his fights do. Bale goes through the gun room without a scratch. Bale takes out all the sword guys no problem. Bale faces the new Cleric (Diggs), and slash slash it’s all over. Though I do have to chide him for the face slide off. What was that, friction, surface tension? What kept the face there so Diggs could turn his head sideways, then let if slide off? Bah.

I also wanted to comment that this was not a high dollar movie. This was not a blockbuster budget. He comments that much of the driving constraints for making the movie was money, how to do things cheaply. Many of the sets are locations in East Berlin, including a train station that is used for the archive and Bale’s office area, and a parking garage that is the library/classroom where Bale finds the entrance to the underground. The set director did an awesome job. I listened to all the times the director comments about choices that limited what he had to do based upon cost, and I find that none of them are points that stuck out to me, that made a difference. Everything they did worked from that standpoint. It’s story element and theme that annoys me, not movie execution.

20

Hadda wait for the ref to drop the puck.