Disappointed by 'Reloaded'? Enough of the 'Matrix'?
Scarcely noticed amid saturation Net coverage of that letdown of my own sci-fi film year — a passable entr'acte which failed to sustain a second viewing — a near flawless masterpiece of the genre, 'Equilibrium,' finally reached Paris screens and undeservedly thin audiences this summer.
With the devastation of World War III behind it, the price humanity has paid for lasting peace in writer-director Kurt Wimmer's aseptic utopia, Libria, is the daily dropping of Prozium, an emotional sedative.
Those who refuse to take it are ruthlessly eliminated by the Ninja-like 'Clerics', with Christian Bale in the lead role as John Preston, toughest of them all. A widower with two kids, Preston's own wife was executed as a transgressor. This is not a family matter to bother a man capable of turning on his own partner for venturing to keep an outlawed book after a seek-and-destroy raid into the Nethers beyond Libria's borders to burn out a group of rebels.
Preston's problems begin the morning he drops his dose of Prozium — on the floor. He's prevented from replacing it by a bomb alert as he's picked up for another mission into the Nethers by his new partner, Brandt (Taye Diggs).
That's where Preston learns to feel. And with emotion come his first acts of rebellion, the discovery of what it is to be truly human.

Wimmer is a shameless magpie. 'Equilibrium' borrows liberally from Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis', Huxley's 'Brave New World,' Orwell's '1984', Bradbury's 'Fahrenheit 451', the Third Reich and, among others, ... 'Matrix'. My minor gripe with a film where the suspense is maintained throughout is that some of these references are a little too obvious.
The result is a highly intelligent thriller full of memorable images and scenes, from the early torching of one of the world's most famous paintings — destined for the flames because of its potential emotional impact — to a martial arts battle near the end which draws on the now-legendary corridor scene from 'Matrix' itself and outdoes it.
'Gun-kata', the fighting technique employed by the Clerics, was developed by Bale himself, according to one 'Equilibrium' (Sci-Fi UK Flash) site. Bale turns in a convincing, at times moving, performance as a man thawing out from a killing machine into a rebel with both heart and cause. Special mentions also go to Sean Bean as Partridge, master of Libria in the name of the Father (or Big Brother), Emily Watson as 'transgressor' Mary O'Brien, and William Fichtner as rebel leader Jurgen.
Plot and action apart, 'Equilibrium' is visually outstanding, including the violence that gets a far more realistic and sometimes disturbing treatment than in some of its "sources".
My daughter walked out thanking her stars she wasn't in Britain, where at 14 she could have been stopped as too young to see what she instantly decided was her "best film of the year". She reviewed it, in French, on the belcatja blog (no permalinks, see 'le 23 juillet') shared with friend Severine.
Very rare move: I gave it 9/10 at the IMDb. I have yet to work out (not that it matters) what "nationality" the movie is, since it flies a US flag but the credit for the excellent musical score by Klaus Badelt and a good number of the cast and production crew go to Germans, while it was partly shot in Italy.