You know a movie is good when you get not one, but two Matrix fans to admit that it was better. I bought the DVD in early June, and I've physically had it in my possession for a total of 5 days. People keep borrowing it and keeping it for rather extended periods of time. There's a waiting list on the bloody thing.

So, what do we have here? A movie about a post-WWIII society that has eliminated war and misfortune and all of society's ills with a miracle drug called Prozium. This savior works it's magic by suppressing virtually all emotion. But it's not just The Giver that this movie resembles. Between the elusive Father, the burning of all that has the potential to inspire emotion, and the amazing Gun-Kata scenes, EQ is influenced by many different things, but still manages to be original and, above all, enjoyable.

Our hero, played by the heartbreakingly handsome and overly talented Christian Bale, is John Preston, Tetragrammaton Cleric First Class and single father of two. As a cleric, Preston's job is to enforce laws enacted by Father and the Council. This primarily entails hunting down "sense-offenders" and sending them to be "processed." A sense-offender is one who stops taking his or her medication and begins experiencing emotion. Purely by accident, Preston fails to take his dose one evening and finds himself in a downward spiral into the world of the sense-offender. The plot is fairly predictable, but the details are not.

Tameika described EQ as "the perfect date movie." The guys are satisfied with the action, the awesome Gun-Kata (martial arts with firearms, basically), and the violence, while the girls get to see Bale, Sean Bean, Taye Diggs (pick your poison) act the living smeg out of a script that requires them to explore feelings. The cinematography is amazing, every shot perfect. It is rated R for violence, though perhaps that's a bit on the strong side. I'm not a fan of senseless violence, but this is disturbingly cool. The massacres look more like dancing sequences than mass murder.

Unfortunately, this gem of a movie was shoveled out of the public eye and doomed to a life of abject obscurity because, after repetitive postponements of release dates, it was finally, at long last, released to approximately five theaters on December 6, 2002. And I never once saw a single commercial, even when it was released on video in mid-May of 2003.

Equilibrium and Gun-Kata was the brainchild of Kurt Wimmer. It is a Dimension Film, and Klaus Badelt composed the (supremely neat) score.

Psst! Like what you see here? There's more!

Don't forget your Prozium on the way out

Created July 5, 2003.