n the future, a third world war has devastated the Earth. In response, the government has outlawed the human quality most likely to give rise to future conflicts: emotion. The entire population has been placed on a regimen of Prozium, a drug that suppresses all feeling. And the government, led by the Tetragrammaton leader known simply as Father, has declared illegal anything that stimulates human emotions: art, music, poetry, even floral wallpaper and snow globes.
To make sure that the population of Libria doesn't yield to emotional temptation, the government has also created a new class of enforcers, called Grammaton Clerics. These highly skilled martial artists hunt down all who would flirt with feelings, and terminate them with extreme prejudice.
The most lethal Cleric is John Preston (Bale), a man whose emotions are so controlled that he didn't bat an eye when his own wife was arrested and incinerated for the "sense offense" of loving him.
When Preston's partner, Partridge (Bean), removes a slim volume of Yeats' poetry from the scene of a sense crime, Preston must pursue him into the "Nethers," the wasteland outside the walled city of Libria.
But when Preston misses a dose of Prozium, he suddenly finds himself susceptible to unknown sensations. A sense offender, Mary O'Brian (Watson), has an unusual pull on him. "To feel is as vital as breathing," she tells him.
But Preston must conceal his feelings from his new partner, Cleric Brandt (Diggs), whose ambition is to unseat Preston as the most successful of the Grammaton Clerics.
Meanwhile, the chief Cleric (Angus MacFadyen) has a new assignment for Preston. Find and destroy the leaders of a new Resistance, a group of sense offenders who would dismantle the government and allow all humanity free rein to their emotions, to the peril of all.
This drug is a little hard to swallow
Equilibrium is a curious SF allegory from Wimmer, a writer best known for adapting Michael Crichton's Sphere for the screen. It has sat on a shelf for nearly two years, after a name change from the original Librium (apparently to avoid conflicts with the company that makes a psychotropic drug of the same name).
Finally coming to theaters before Christmas, Equilibrium would be a visually striking, thought-provoking mix of action and meditative SF if viewers hadn't already been treated to similar dystopian visions in films from Metropolis to Fahrenheit 451 to Brazil and even this year's Minority Report. Like all these films and more, Equilibrium envisions a sleek totalitarian future in which the individual is ground under the boot heel of the state, only to rise up (or attempt to rise up) to regain his sense of self and his freedom. Wimmer adds the not-very-original twist of emotional control, as if Libria were a hybrid of Nazi Germany and Vulcan.
The film is almost humor-free and as subtle as a set of brass knuckles. The ruling party is called the Tetragrammaton, the Greek term for the ineffable four-letter Hebrew name of God. The leader is called Father. Get it? Fatherland? And to hammer home the evil nature of the Grammaton Clerics, they actually shoot up a pen full of puppies.
A few things redeem this otherwise dreary exercise. Wimmer has a terrific visual sense. The production design is spot-on, and the cityscapes owe a lot to Leni Riefenstahl, by way of Frank Lloyd Wright. Costumes, props and sets give Equilibrium a retro richness that recalls Gattaca and 1984's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Wimmer is also virtuosic with action. An opening gun battle is shot in almost complete darkness, with only muzzle flashes to illuminate the quick-cut action. And Wimmer ups the ante of The Matrix, combining gunplay with martial-arts wirework to create a new hyper-stylized form of fighting, something he calls "gun kata." The result is thrilling—hand-to-hand pistol shooting mixed with balletic martial-arts movements.
