After a stint in the ‘90s as a high-priced hack screenwriter and a directorial debut, One Tough Bastard (1996), that was by all accounts a great title in search of a movie, Kurt Wimmer gained a minor cult thanks to Equilibrium, a rousingly executed and unguarded sci-fi action film. He then immediately lost his new cred with 2005’s much-loathed Ultraviolet. That’s a pity because Equilibrium, obviously indebted to earlier hits, like The Matrix, and anticipating V for Vendetta, is reminiscent of an era in cinema when quite often the cheaper, nastier imitations of the big-ticket movies were easily superior, and Equilibrium likewise stands out for narrative robustness and visually explicable action. Equilibrium also probably made the case for Bale’s promotion to Batman-level superstardom, but his role here far better suits his capacity to depict frayed humanity only hazily visible through steely purpose: I’d watch this five dozen times before suffering the murky, ill-focused The Dark Knight again, and it’s far less inert and faux-serious than the stylistically similar Gattaca. The relative strength of the material is signalled clearly by the high quality of the film’s cast, and the result can perhaps most accurately be described as a feature-length expansion of Ridley Scott’s famous 1984 Apple Computers commercial.
Nonetheless it’s easy to see about forty years’ worth of genre influences here, cross-bred with hi-fi action. Equilibrium boils a fight-the-man power fantasy down to stark essentials in a future setting where, following a cataclysmic third world war, the new order that’s steadily rebuilding and pacifying an unnamed city has adopted forceful social control based on an emotion-suppressing drug called Librium. All cultural adornments springing from emotional, personal expression are destroyed, and those who fail to maintain their regimen of the drug are executed as dangerous subversives without exception. The idea that this is somehow superior to a world beset by the messy results of human emotionalism is of course immediately suspect.
The state is represented to the populace by the Big Brother ring-in Father (Sean Pertwee) and crimes against that state most effectively punished by the Grammaton Clerics, black-clad SS-like ideologues trained in “Gunkata”, a martial art based on studies of gunfights, that renders them near-invincible super-warriors. This corps is headed up by overlord Dupont (Angus MacFadyen, whose innate villainy is immediately established by his excess of hair gel), and the most famous and talented of his Clerics is John Preston (Bale), a formidably stony and talented prodigy whose own wife was executed for “sense crimes”, leaving him to rear two children (Matthew Harbour and Emily Siewert), and who begins the long, painful path towards humanity when he executes his partner, Partridge (Sean Bean), for pilfering and reading a volume of Yeats’ poetry. Preston is given a new partner, the slick, ambitious, gruesomely self-confident Brandt (Taye Diggs).
Soon after, he arrests Mary O’Brien (Emily Watson), Partridge’s lover and hoarder of banned material, who prods Preston ’s shackled emotions and reminds him inevitably of his wife. The seed her death planted is now germinated, as Preston , after a day’s accidental lapse, more purposefully ceases his medication, and begins to become aware of the world around him in some surprisingly well-handled sequences. Finally, his newly febrile feelings drive him into violent acts against the state security, and he enters the underground revolution he and his fellow Clerics had vainly sought. Whether Brandt and Dupont will catch onto his transgressions seems, however, a mere question of when and how they’ll make use of them.
Wimmer’s story and style certainly aren’t subtle, but they are each intelligibly employed with exactly the right pace and adolescent sense of shit-cool anarchy. Moreover, Wimmer has time to note some interesting contradictions in what defines humanity and what is then at stake in this battle. Revolutionary leader Jurgen (William Fichtner) explains to Preston the importance that men like them leash their emotions with deliberation, in order to be effective rather than, as Preston as already done, kill a half-dozen policemen in order to save a puppy’s life. It’s always funny in these films where we see artworks being destroyed by righteous barbarians – here, it’s the Mona Lisa on the receiving end of a flamethrower – which are always, of course, improbably obvious and iconic objects. But such shorthand is par for the course.
Wimmer, with the aid of Dion Beebe’s effective photography, exposes Preston ’s altering viewpoint through the predictable detail of having the omnipresent blue and grey hues give way to warmer tones – the “feelers” themselves often standing out in colour against the nearly monochromatic backgrounds. And yet moments like when Bale peels away the membrane glued to his window and looks out upon a cityscape gleaming in rapturous, hallucinatory beauty in a rainstorm, in the first truly transformative vision of his post-drug cognisance, possess a genuine, succinct pop-art force. Wimmer’s happy to show his roots, like Neil Marshall, in popular models of the ‘70s and ‘80s, but unlike Marshall
Wimmer’s snappy employment of art direction and imagery achieves an iconographic nexus, tossing into the mix Bauhaus modernism, evocations of Hitlerian book-burning, post-war Orwellian anxiety, anti-pharmaceutical new-age paranoia, a jibe aimed at the nebulous conceptualisation of the “hate crime” as possessing the potential for authoritarian abuse, and the tropes of several different national varieties of action movie. It’s hard not to feel ambivalence to the notion that raw, cleansing violence unleashed by a slicked-up superman employing the technofascist arts of his enemies can be called a triumph of the human spirit, and yet Equilibrium only extends a familiar sci-fi conundrum, that humanity’s capacity for destruction is the necessary correlation to creativity.
Anyway, it’s all an excuse for some serious ass-kickery. That action, kept to a minimum for much of the film apart from instructive bouts that confirm Preston’s potent potential force, finally cuts loose in the finale, when Preston, discovering he’s been used, and that Father is merely an illusory puppet figure disguising Dupont’s cynical authoritarianism, sees him rampaging through the halls of power, the regime falling prey to a Frankenstein’s monster of its own making, as he slices and dices his way through his former Cleric fellows, including special nemesis Brandt. In the end, the fate of the world comes down to two guys duelling with samurai swords. Dude!
The excellent line-up of actors is perhaps under-employed – especially David Hemmings in a bewilderingly brief appearance – but they’re uniformly effective, especially Bale, Bean, and Watson, who work for a convincing emotional investment in their parts, however brief and regardless of the circumstances. Diggs is, however, a gas in suggesting that amongst the emotions Librium suppresses, campy relish of his own excellent villainy isn’t one of them. It’s all far from being the greatest or most serious work of genre allegory, but Equilibrium’s just as much fun as it needs to be, and more.
Rollerball (1975): Timeless Sci-Fi Classic