Release Date: December 6, 2002
Director: Kurt Wimmer
Starring: Christian Bale, Taye Diggs, Sean Bean, Emily Watson, Dominic Purcell, William Fitchner
Notable quote: “The gun kata treats the gun as a total weapon, each fluid position representing a maximum kill zone, inflicting maximum damage on the maximum number of opponents while keeping the defender clear of the statistically traditional trajectories of return fire.”– DuPont
The action sci-fi genre has seen tons of entries, and tons of those fall by the wayside. Some are campy enough in their shittiness to survive as a cult hit; Sharknado comes to mind. Others, like The Matrix and the original Robocop, are cemented in the minds of movie lovers as classics that either reinvented or reinvigorated the genre. But there is a subset of movies that are practically underground. They are nowhere near as bad as After Earth or Jupiter Ascending, but they’re not as loved as Blade Runner or Total Recall. For me, Equilibrium is one of those movies.
I didn’t see it when it premiered in 2002. Other titles like The Bourne Identity, Minority Report, and Blade II occupied my attention. When I finally did get to see it, my balls were nearly blown off.
Part of the reason the movie is so unknown is its story. As action sci-fi plots go, it’s pretty cookie cutter. The year is 2072. After World War III, the survivors regroup and form a new city state, Libria. It is a totalitarian state – of course – and the government decides that the key to living in peace is suppressing all emotions and encourage obedience. To that end, they develop a drug called Prozium. All citizens of Libria are mandated to inject themselves with Prozium daily. Anyone caught off their Prozium and feeling emotions are arrested as “sense offenders” and taken to be executed. The government also decrees any form of the arts, including music and literature, to be illegal.
It’s pretty bland sci-fi stuff so far, like Pink Floyd’s The Wall in 2072. Granted, the narrative does have a bit of depth, examining the emotions of people who are breaking the law just by feeling. The mere act of owning a pet dog is a crime, and it is interesting to see what depths people will go through just to have emotions and pet a dog.
The movie follows Cleric John Preston (Christian Bale), one of the top enforcers of the Tetragrammaton Council, the governing body of Libria. After performing a raid against some contraband smugglers, he is forced to execute his partner Errol Partridge (Sean Bean) for committing a sense offense. The following day, he does not take his Prozium and begins to feel. The remainder of the movie is about his struggle to deal with is emotions while hiding them from the Tetragrammaton Council. He soon makes contact with the Underground movement and starts having feelings for Maria O’Brien, a member of the movement.
Again, this is standard dystopian/totalitarian sci-fi mumbo-jumbo that litters hundreds of lesser sci-fi titles. What sets Equilibrium apart from those is the action scenes. For the time, Equilibrium has some of the most badass action scenes the genre had seen since The Matrix. In some cases, they were even better.
The movie’s Clerics are masters of a form of combat called “gun kata”. The term and fighting style were created by director Hurt Wimmer and fight choreographer Jim Vickers. It’s similar to other styles of gun fu, where firearms are an extension of hand-to-hand combat, except gun kata is based on memorization of probabilities, rather than reflexes and luck. All Clerics are trained to see any combat situation and instantly calculate statistical probabilities for the position of his body versus the positions of his enemies. They are then able to position themselves to be able to dodge enemy fire while firing at the enemies. The theory is that they can calculate the trajectory of every firearm and knock off their enemy’s aim while having perfect aim themselves.
In practice, it is literally martial arts with guns. Imagine Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kune Do while wielding twin 9mm Glocks and you get the idea. The battles are ballets of destruction, with acrobatic moves leading to headshots. It isn’t very graceful, though; Preston’s movements are almost robotic, his arms stiff and precise as he dispatches his foes. In one scene, he has two shotguns pointed directly at his head. With one effortless swipe, he reverses the aim of both boomsticks and blows off the owners’ heads. All the while, Preston’s face is as blank as a sheet of paper. It’s a little unsettling, but it is definitely badass.
The gun kata alone carries the movie in my eyes. The story is at least entertaining, and that helps during repeated viewings. But every time I play this movie, I just wanna see the action scenes. They are a visceral thrill.
If you never saw this movie, you should rectify that immediately. If you have, tell your friends about it. While not a cinematic masterpiece like The Martian, it is still a great flick for the action sci-fi junkie.
