EQUILIBRIUM

EQUILIBRIUM. Kurt Wimmer, dir., script. USA: Blue Tulip (prod.) / Dimension and Miramax (US dist.), 2002. Christian Bale, star. Wolf Kroeger, production design. Erik Olson and Justin Warburton-Brown, art direction. Joseph A. Porro, costume design.

"Recombinant cinema" (pastiche) film of a post-World-War III totalitarian dystopia where emotion is forbidden and held in check with required drug use in order to prevent war. (In addition to such obvious sources as G. Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, A. Huxley's Brave New World, Truffaut's FAHRENHEIT 451 — and G. Lucas's film THX 1138 — cf. and definitely contrast H. Ellison's "Asleep: With Still Hands," plus the frequently-noted, Romantic theme of emotions central to humanity [including violent emotions, e.g., in the 20-chapter version of A. Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, and Joe Haldeman's Forever Peace]). Significant here for the visual design of the dystopia: both monumental Modern and po-mo, with the villains relatively clean-cut in both modes and the underground resistance heroes in neither camp: mostly just scruffy and living, when possible, among a pre-Modern, relative richness of esthetic clutter. The devices for injecting the emotion-deadening drug, the cop outfits, and automatic weapons available, apparently, to just about everyone are rather po-mo (as they are in our world); but generally the totalitarian technology is rendered with Modern telescreens and computers, and totalitarian architecture and interior design is thoroughly Modernist: machines for quasi-living. (RDE, 06/04/03)

RDE, Title, 21Aug19