“Equilibrium” is not all internal affairs, however. But Big Brother Brandt is watching Preston. And, acting on orders of Angus MacFadyen’s urbane, probing Dupont, the chief lieutenant of the unseen Father, Preston infiltrates the underground, where he becomes a convert under the spiritual tutelage of William Fichtner’s sanctified and holy Jurgen.
Watson’s Mary, with her doll-like blue eyes, becomes his ideal, though she is incarcerated awaiting immolation. Without Prozium, Preston begins to see the beauties of rain on a window, and of sunlight. Paul Anderton in “Minority Report.” The difference is that taking drugs, in this case the emotionally suppressive Prozium, is required in Libria. That 1985 film, written in part by Tom Stoppard, mixed its grimness with humor, however, which is what the lugubrious “Equilibrium” desperately needs.Īt the center of Wimmer’s film is the martinet supercop John Preston, played by the ultra-handsome Christian Bale as a more rigid version of Tom Cruise’s Capt. But although “Equilibrium” flashes up huge “Big Brother” sermonizing television images, the overall look of the film, largely created by Digital Cityscapes, often recalls Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil,” with its latter-day Orwellian urban ugliness and its rebel underground. The 1984 version of “1984,” directed by Michael Radford, hewed closer to the novel than the first adaptation, in 1955. “Equilibrium” appropriates the notion of “firemen” who torch forbidden books, though here they are fascistic ninja cops, called “clerics,” in the service of the almighty Father, and they also burn art treasures, such as the Mona Lisa.
In 1966, Francois Truffaut made “Fahrenheit 451,” more or less dismissed at the time despite its poetic images and the power of its ideas. The Big Brothers behind Kurt Wimmer’s “Equilibrium” freely admit that their vision of a future Dystopia borrows from such famed works as Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” and George Orwell’s “1984.” As new depictions of despotic worlds go, this voyage into the dark heart of drug-controlled Libria has a few new twists, including its own variations on “Matrix” bullet-dodging, but in its relentless dreariness, it falls short of the films made directly from Bradbury and Orwell.
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