Equilibrium Review

Kurt Wimmer had twenty million dollars, Berlin's fascist architecture and one genuinely new idea, which was to treat pistol fighting as a martial art with geometry behind it. The gun kata sequences still look like nothing else, particularly the dark room shootout and the final corridor, and Christian Bale commits to them and to everything around them with a seriousness the screenplay has not remotely earned. Because the screenplay is a photocopy. Fahrenheit 451, Nineteen Eighty Four and THX 1138 have all been run through the machine, and the emotion suppressing drug called Prozium is so blunt a device that the film keeps stopping to explain it.

The world falls apart the moment you lean on it, since a state that executes people for feeling would not staff its enforcement arm with men who read Yeats within a week of a missed dose. Emily Watson brings more in eight minutes than the entire second act manages, and Taye Diggs plays ambition as a smirk. The politics are oddly bloodless too, gesturing at a ruling Father without ever showing what daily life under him costs anyone who is not a cleric with a gun.