Genre: Drama, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Rated: R
What did the filmmakers want? The whole plot primarily based on "1984" book by George Orwell + Science Fiction Meds to realize the Orwell concept biologically + a poor, really really poor and slow Matrix (1999) effect for shooting+Batman Begins' costume, weapon and ninja style practice and fights+ scenes of uniformity/sunshine/workspaces/sepia picture color borrowed from Gattaca= Equilibrium? Even after borrowing so much from predecessors, everything in this movie lacked any brain, plot or genuine efforts gone into script, cinematography or performance for that matter.
Let's dissect this annoying little squirmy insect on my petridish here. What was the plot? Same as the "1984" book except for the fact that instead of curing the offenders barbarically in the cellars, they were exterminated on spot or were apprehended to be scheduled for live-incineration at government quarters.
The movie starts poorly. The orator gives a boring speech and the background music tries to get you into something you don't really care about. One of the first scenes in which Sean Bean doesn't participate in the killing process but is being focused looking in an inept homosexual manner at Christian Bale who was a character like Neo of Matrix whose job was to remain inexplicably bullet-proof throughout the movie and kill everybody in the vicinity with his stupid ninja fighting and firing skills. As the movie progresses you see more flaws in the direction when the adversary could even fire one bullet while Christian Bale could fire rounds and rounds without been hit once. Kurt Wimmer should have been more careful in considering a one man force getting at least hurt on more body parts than on just lips when he is on his way to destruction of the high command and that there are more levels and challenges to meet when you do that. You don't just put up a small fight of 50 seconds or so to annihilate the entire army and expect the audience to buy it. When this was done in Star Wars, at least there was a grave and serious plot, a decent army and a one man team being helped by a lot more men against an arch enemy.
And what about the cinematography? Wimmer wasted a lot of time focusing camera on Christian Bale in an effort to focus his state of extreme pain and thought process which half of the time seemed ideal sitting in a library like environment loitering with unimportant stuff and rarely culminating into anything important afterwards, a poor imitation of Gattaca's work space and activities. Their "Nether World" lacked any sense at all. The dog scene was dragged too much. Bale should have saved the girl not the dog with so much efforts. Throughout the movie, you keep revising where have you seen this and that before..how the movie could be rearranged to produce a plausible screenplay.
Technologically, the high tech future city seemed a normal USA city with skyscrapers just the picture shade was changed to Sepia instead of normal RGB in an effort to imitate Gattaca's visual effect. The funniest and the most embarrassing technologically flawed event was when the guy at the reception turned around what looked like a high tech computer/electronic device that turned out to be a normal register containing sheets of papers! So, while the books and movies this film seems to be inspired from became a classics, this whole effort of making Equilibrium sadly seemed forgettable, predictable and laughable result of pastiche of and plagiarism from too many movies previous made.
