I just watched Equilibrium for the first time a few months ago. I really liked it, and think it deserves more attention.
I just watched Equilibrium for the first time a few months ago. I really liked it, and think it deserves more attention.
I really liked it too, and was shocked to find that its a 1 star movie on cable...
I think it deserves more than one star for sure, but I can understand it being fairly poorly rated by critics. I've called it "the dumbest movie that I love" here before.
It's sort of like
The Fifth Element. If you really break
TFE down to its core idea, which is "giant interplanetary ball of evil is defeated by an alien love beam" you'd laugh your ass off and be surprised that it was a big budget film and not a SyFy movie of the week. But when you take in the whole package of the humor, music, fight and other choreography, the spectacular and unique production design/costuming/world building, etc. it becomes something special.
Equilibrium is sort of the same way. The whole suppressing emotions/emotions causing global war bit is straight out of
Star Trek and Vulcans (in fact, just for fun I've pictured that world as one where the Vulcans landed post-WWIII and forcefully imposed their ideology on us), right along with some of the actors not getting the memo that they were supposed to be unemotional (I'm looking at you, Taye Diggs), just like some actors playing Vulcans never got it. It's kind of a silly premise to begin with.