Irrelevance Glorified

You’re probably shocked and confused that there are two angry bad rants so close to one another. Well, the publishing of the rant for G.I. Joe was precipitated by my viewing of Equilibrium. As I was watching this movie, I realized it was perfect for a rant, but I had a draft of that G.I. Joe one sitting in the queue. So, I pushed it out so I can get going on this one.

Equilibrium is a 2002 action flick starring Christian Bale & Taye Diggs, among others. While not getting the greatest reviews when it came out (37% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes), it’s had a bit of resurgence in the intervening time, and at this point it’s rated 7.8/10 on IMDB. Because of the intriguing re-evaluation of this film’s merits, I thought it was worth a Netflix rental. As it turns out….this is a bad movie. Read on for more, spoilers included.

This story takes place in the not-too-far-off future, sometime after a World War III that causes much global suffering. In its aftermath, a new city-state was formed called Libria. Libria is a very orderly society, with little obvious crime and a population that never indulges in excess. The secret is that in Libria, feeling is outlawed. That’s right : feeling. The idea is that strong feelings incite violence, crime, all the horrible things in the world, and the horrible consequences of these negative emotions outweigh the good consequences of positive emotions. So feelings are out the door. But how to execute this? Well, first of all, every citizen of Libria has to take doses of a drug called “Prozium” (hmmm, could it be any more obviously like Prozac?) that suppresses their emotions. At certain points throughout the day, there is a chime heard throughout the city, and then everyone takes a dose, called an interval. This drug is dispensed at government pharmacies called equilibrium centers. These doses are mandatory, but it’s difficult to enforce. Thus, Libria has an extensive police presence that enforces this behavior. If “sense offenders” (seriously) are found, they are arrested and (theoretically) tried, with the punishment being incineration. Like, putting them in a chamber and burning them.

Libria is ruled by the Tetragrammaton Council, which sounds like a fascist library tribunal. At the top of the Council is Father (who strangely reminded me of Steve Jobs), who shows up on video screens throughout Libria periodically, giving speeches explaining how important it is for everyone to follow the rules and do their part for society. Father is very reclusive and only speaks to his council. Beneath the council and head of the police are the Tetragrammaton Clerics, specially trained police and investigators who lead the search for sense offenders and contraband (known as EC-10 material for its emotional content). This is the situation we find ourselves in as the movie starts.

It’s a grungy, dirty, abandoned building. A man is listening to a record on a record player (something that is outlawed in Libria). Suddenly, a whole host of police cars pull up. The occupants of the building shout out words of alarm and warning, and everyone grabs rifles and shotguns; they know that this is a battle to the death. Despite their great skills in pointing their guns out of the windows and blindly firing at the police below, the police are unscathed and soon storm the building. But it’s not just the normal police who are here : there are two Tetragrammaton clerics here as well, Partridge (played by Sean Bean) and John Preston (Christian Bale). A few spectacular fight scenes later, the building is cleared, and the search for contraband commences. Preston has a sixth sense for finding this stuff, and he soon orders the floorboards in a room to be pulled up, revealing works of art, which are a controlled substance. In fact, its the real Mona Lisa! It’s quite a successful raid, something to be proud of.

I’ll take a break here to point out a few things. I imagine the director/producer picked out the Mona Lisa because its so recognizable, perhaps the most recognizable painting. But in general, I would not say that the Mona Lisa is the most emotion-provoking painting I could think of. Not a huge catch, there, in my view.

Secondly, I must talk about Gunkata. This is the martial art that the Tetragrammaton Clerics are trained in. The traditional martial arts use arms and legs and sometimes weapons, but everything is always short range. As I mentioned during my G.I. Joe rant, the easiest way to combat ninjas are to run backwards while shooting (assuming you ever see them). In Equilibrium, the clerics are trained on how to use firearms in their martial arts. Which seems strange…how can you block a bullet? A martial art involving firearms would just have to be completely based on shooting the opponent while not getting shot at all yourself. Which is exactly what Gunkata is about. One of the premises of Gunkata is that “the geometric distribution of antagonists in any gun battle is a statistically predictable element.” Therefore, with careful study, an expert in Gunkata can predict where everyone is, avoid their shots, and then return fire. In addition, a skilled Gunkata-ist can use their firearm as an effective melee weapon.

The following is a YouTube video posted by a user who has helpfully spliced together all of the action scenes of the movie. Although I think this movie is stupid, the action scenes are worth watching, as this movie, if nothing else, is very stylish and visually striking. You probably don’t have 9 minutes of time, so I’ll just say the good parts are between 0:45-1:42, 2:53-3:35, 5:40-6:24, 6:32-7:42, and 8:00-9:05.

I have a few problems with this. For one, let’s say that the Tetragrammaton Cleric can determine a firearm’s location and trajectory with 99.5% accuracy. The number of people Bale takes on in this movie is roughly 50 …. the chances of him avoiding 50 shots with those odds is a mere 78%. “Playing the odds” is something you do in the stock market and in the casino, when you just need to have more wins than losses at the end of the day. This is more like russian roulette, where one wrong bet ends the game. Also, in a lot of the action scenes, it’s not like he’s dodging the bullets. He’s just moving his arms. His ability to, at a glance (or perhaps by sound), notice the positions of all the shooters and start shooting at them all rapid-fire is plausible, but everything else isn’t.

But I’m getting off track from my deconstruction. After finding and burning the Mona Lisa, Preston and Partridge are being driven home. Preston asks Partridge why he didn’t burn a book of poetry, which Partridge had put in his pocket himself. Partridge says that he was going to turn it into the incinerator personally, to make sure it got taken care of. The seeds of doubt have been planted. Of course, it turns out that Partridge has not been taking his Prozium doses, and thus has been feeling emotions. He took the book of Yeats poetry for his own enjoyment. In the end, Preston is forced to kill him for his crimes.

After this “painful” experience, Preston forgets to take a dose of Prozium himself, and starts to question his own beliefs in the system. As the Prozium bleeds from his system, he finds himself drawn into the mystery of Partridge’s life, and spends time trying to figure out Partridge’s connection to the rebellion and the underground movement.

Eventually, he’s given a new partner, Brandt, played by Taye Diggs. Brandt suspects that Preston is off his meds, and is driven to prove that he’s been feeling emotions. The thing is, Brandt appears to be righteous and ambitious (he feels that by exposing Preston, he will make his career). Last time I checked…those were emotions. It seems like if he’s on his Prozium, he should just want to do his job, check in at 9 , check out at 5. Not make a play for a promotion. And later in the movie, when Preston frames him for crimes, Brandt is furious at the deception, vowing revenge. Again, emotion.

Brandt and Preston’s first assignment is to lead the charge against rebels in the “Nethers”, people holding out in a warehouse, no doubt hiding contraband. Preston, with his newly found conscience, is empathetic towards the rebels, and doesn’t actually shoot anybody, although he doesn’t stop the slaughter, all the same. After the building has been cleared, he and Brandt are called behind the building to investigate a discovery, in what turns out to be probably the most (unintentionally) funny scene in the whole film. It’s a fenced off area filmed with dogs. Like, puppies. Brandt expresses wonder at the concept, theorizing that they are there for food. You see, in the one generation (I’m assuming) that Libria has been without emotion, people have forgotten about the concept of pets. Anyways, this is against regulations, so one of the soldiers walks in and starts blowing away puppies with a shotgun. You hear yelps and whimpers of pain, and see the look of disgust and horror appear on Preston’s face. Suddenly, one of the puppies gets past the soldier and runs out of the caged area. “Someone catch him!” Preston grabs him before he can get away, and lifts him up to get a good look at him. Of course, its just about the cutest puppy in the world, whimpering at him. Ignoring the offers to kill the dog for him, Preston stutters that he’s keeping the dog “to run some tests and see what diseases he has” and blusters off.

Of course, Preston can do nothing of the sort, and returns to the Nethers later on to set the dog free. But even then, he can’t stand the pitiful whimpering of the dog, and puts him back in his trunk, deciding to keep him. Just then, he is stopped by a patrol of cars investigating his admittedly suspicious behavior. The patrol leader eventually recognizes Preston as a cleric, and is about to leave, when he hears the puppy bark from within Preston’s trunk. Discovered, Preston is forced to kill everyone in the patrol in spectacular fashion (2:53 – 3:35 in the YouTube video).

The shocking murder of the patrol results in an order from the Librian government to crack down, and soon Brandt and Preston are sent to another sector of the Nethers to kill some more rebels. Just like last time, Preston’s conscience and empathy prevents him from killing the rebels, but this time he takes it a step further and kills Librian soldiers in order to allow the escape of the rebels. There is a ridiculous scene (5:40 – 6:24 of the YouTube video) where he stands in the middle of six soldiers and then beats them all to death with the grips of his pistols. He does this without getting shot, and without any of the soldiers taking two steps back and then shooting. All his efforts are for naught, though, and all the rebels are rounded up and executed, although Preston refuses to do the deed himself, making Brandt even more sure about his treason.

Realizing that he’s gone too far to turn back, now, Preston makes contact with the Resistance (under the guise of working as a double-agent), and is convinced that Father must be killed. Unfortunately, a private audience with the man is impossible, since he is a paranoid and never appears to anyone. The only way Preston could be granted an audience is if he does something spectacular, like infiltrate the resistance and arrest them. So, the resistance turns themselves in so that Preston can get his audience. Unfortunately, the Tetragrammaton Council has known of Preston’s betrayal all along (it wasn’t hard to figure it out, really. He was fairly unstable and prone to emotional thinking), and let him think that Brandt had been successfully framed. In actuality, this was all a trap for Preston, and now they had the Resistance and the treasonous Cleric. To prove that Preston is off of his meds, they submit him to a polygraph test, since it should be able to detect anxiety and the physiological changes that will plague a guy lying when he’s just been taken off of Prozium. At this point, another secret is revealed : Father has been dead for some time, and is just a computer-generated image at this point. The real power, the voice behind Father, has been a council-member named DuPont whom Preston has spent the whole movie talking to. Preston realizes that he has been in the presence of the dictator the whole time.

However, they forgot the Tetragrammaton’s secret weapon : sleeves! Preston hides all sorts of guns and munitions up there, and he bust them out to kill the guards in the room and make his way to DuPont. What follows are a few stirring action sequences that lead him to the office of DuPont. There is a stunningly anticlimactic penultimate battle with Brandt (but not anticlimactic in a bad way), and then a hand-to-hand gunfight with DuPont, a fellow Gunkata practioner. If you’re wondering how you can have a hand-to-hand gunfight, just watch the last minute or so of the YouTube video. After DuPont’s death, Preston sends a signal to the resistance, which sets off timed explosives in the Prozium factories and starts the uprising, shooting and killing the soldiers for the first time. Revolution has come.

My objections to the movie are partly material, in that this world of Libria that has developed isn’t as devoid of emotion as they would like us to believe. There is still righteousness and anger. I guess I was thinking it should be more like the Vulcans and less like a cold-hearted killer. In some of the special features, they had interviews with the castmembers, and one thing that Taye Diggs said drew him to the script was the concept that it was “a morality play”. Sure, yeah, it was a morality play in the sense that there were bad people and, uh, mostly less bad people. But it wasn’t a morality play in the sense that there was moral ambiguity to be explored. You’re not sitting there wondering who the good guys and the bad guys were. It was pretty cut and dry. On my last international plane ride I watched Training Day (Denzel Washington, Ethan Hawke), and that movie was surprisingly ambiguous. You could leave that movie thinking “Yeah, that cop is crooked, but perhaps he was justified in his actions. When you’re trying to control evil people, maybe there’s no choice but to be evil yourself.” But in Equilibrium, there was no such sense. The Prozium had blinded the Librians to the inhumanity of what they were doing. In the name of stopping all war….they were killing hundreds and hundreds of people that were doing nothing more than listening to music, reading books, and looking at art. Its not like the Clerics were busting up child prostitution rings lead by people who weren’t taking Prozium.

Secondly, I was disappointed at where the twist in this movie led to. If Libria was actual, I think that the scandal would be a little bit different. Perhaps Father’s dogma could last through his life, if he was suitably charismatic enough, but I find it hard to believe that after his death, that the main philosophy of his teachings would still hold. Instead, what I would expect would happen is that the highest members of government would all forgo Prozium in order to partake in emotion, because as the upper class, they would feel entitled to feel the awesome things that Prozium provides. And as long as the lower classes are taking Prozium, then they have a bunch of sheeple to lead around. The perfect situation, in other words. Perhaps this is just classist of me.

In the end, I wonder how much of the new found respect for this movie lies in politics. I mean, there are militia people out in Montana who hoard guns, sure that the government is going to come and take all their firearms, burn their churches, and implant microchips in them. Equilibrium is a wet dream for them — its the manifestation of all their dictatorial, big-government fears, and justifies all their paranoia. Perhaps its just a reflection of my political biases that I find the premise ridiculous, and my alternative twist to be more plausible.

If this movie had come out before the Matrix, I would give it more points for being original. However, while stylish and possessing some great action sequences, the ridiculousness of this movie just makes me label it as : angry-bad.

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