When food is gone you are my daily meal

Each Day, A Film:
January 9th 2012

I am fascinated by the way in which narratives occasionally get welded together for the necessity of making a film. With that in mind: Equilibrium.



Let's not even start about how Sean Bean seems to have a cinematic death wish.

No, wait, lets.



Anyway. Equilibrium is all kinds of fascinating to me because someone, somewhere, had a thought process something like this:

"Right. Prozac, everyone's taking it. Nice gunplay, everyone's interested since The Matrix. What else... Oh, right! Orwellian post-fascist state politics! Winning!"

I love Equilibrium in equal proportion to how much the central premise doesn't work. Said central premise runs like so:

(I) Eliminate emotion by mandatory mass-dosage of prozac-substitute drugs;
(II) ??????????
(III) Christian Bale starts with the face-slicing Profit!

So now all kinds of artwork and culture are verboten because they might provoke emotions, and emotions lead to war. This is literally the logic; you can't have love without hate, anger without compassion, desire without lust, so why not just eliminate everything and have Christian Bale slicing people's faces off a society where everyone is just a lovely little cog in Sean Pertwee's giant wheel?

If you do experience emotions, you're part of the resistance that hides authentic Mona Lisas under your floorboards. Except that Christian Bale can literally smell culture - he knows if it's under the floor, behind the walls, wherever. Copy of La Boheme hidden under carpets in the attic? Casablanca on DVD in a safe covered under the ornamental koi carp pond? War and Peace first editions on the moon? Fuck you, Christian Bale can smell that culture.

And Christian Bale has guns, and he knows how to use them. That's part of the welding; the elaborate Gun Kata system, while visually beautiful, is very, very strange. One of the stand-out sequences is in the first application of the system; Christian Bale - and I know I could refer to him as Grammaton Cleric whatsisface but where's the fun in that? - fly-kicks a door as the bolts are blown off, surfs the door into the centre of a room packed with militants in the dark, and none of them think "Well, if we just shoot in the centre of the room we might hit each other but we can't miss that cocky prick".

Grammaton Clerics are apparently indestructible by being the Bruce Lee of the gun world, wherein however many people they face they're so fast and so well-trained that it's nothing to flip a shotgun 180 degrees while it's in someone's hand and shoot them in the face.

And this only happens because Christian Bale has fallen in love with a puppy.

Seriously.

Sean Bean falls in love with a Yeats poem;

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet,
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams



And it's not enough for Christian Bale to shoot him because of this; he also has to shoot Sean Bean through the book because it's all philosophical and whatnot for Sean Bean to be using culture as his shield, albeit a shield that's not great against gunpowder projectile weapons at point-blank range.

When Christian Bale accidentally misses his dose of prozac prozium, he's okay at masking it until he accidentally picks up a dog during a mass culling, leading to hilarity, people getting shot in the face and, eventually, yes, a face-slicing.

There's a lot to love about Equilibrium; the special effects and Gun Kata are very well-crafted, the world is nicely realised in the gap between total order and cultured chaos, wherein hiding a book can lead to transports full of armed people storming your house. Inside the city, all is order; outside, it's all postindustrial ruins. In the city, everything is literally in black and white; outside, at least you get to wear camoflage gear.

Now, ask yourself; if you're taking a mood stabiliser that eliminates love as much as it does hate, why did Christian Bale get married in the first place? TvTropish 'Fridge Brilliance' suggests that Sean Pertwee runs an intensive dating program to match people up so that they can fuck keep the population going; you can kind of see it now, can't you?

Christian Bale

Occupation:

Grammaton Cleric

Likes:

Guns, Long dark coats, sleeping on a mattress without sheets or covering, looking after stray dogs, slicing people's faces off

Dislikes:

Culture, emotions, guns being in people's hands other than his own, Sean Bean (eventually), not slicing people's faces off.

At least by the end of things there's a happy ending, in that people wake up from their comatose mood-stabilised stupor and... Wait... War breaks out? Yeah, that's the perfect happy ending right there.