By Drew Dietsch
| Published
I recently had to write a script for a list of movies that I felt owed a little or a big debt to The Matrix. One of the movies that I focused on for the shortest amount of time in that video was 2002’s Equilibrium, written and directed by Kurt Wimmer, writer and director of 2020’s Children of the Corn, one of the all-time worst Stephen King movies I have ever seen.
So now that I’ve admitted to giving Kurt’s sci-fi movie the short shrift in that video and I’ve properly reminded people that he made, no joke, a worse Stephen King movie than both of The Mangler sequels, I want to give Wimmer’s best directing effort a fair shake when looking back at it, because both the movie and its release are definitely worth another look.
Equilibrium Makes Smart Sci-Fi Stupid
So, the very first criticism of Equilibrium we have to address is the story and alternate future world it takes place in, because a word I’m sure gets used against this movie is “derivative.”
It’s a word used when a piece of art is taking some recognizable source of inspiration and people don’t feel it’s doing anything… well, inspired with it. Instead they can’t help but see it as a copy-and-paste job.
Equilibrium is unquestionably taking inspiration from classic and therefore familiar sci-fi dystopian novels and imagery, creating a world where human beings live in a fascist state where emotion and artistic expression are suppressed in the name of eliminating war.
It reminds me more than a little of my favorite video I’ve done for this channel on Harrison Bergeron. You should watch that.
The society of Libria in Equilibrium, an openly fascist state (no one ever accused Kurt Wimmer of subtlety), maintains peace by mandating everyone take an emotion-killing drug called Prozium. Like I said, Kurt and subtlety ain’t bedfellows, even if this is just a topical riff and rebranding of Soma from Huxley’s Brave New World.
Equilibrium’s handling of its inspirations reminds me of another sci-fi movie that gets the “D” word, 2013’s Oblivion. Both these movies’ visual styles are action-focused, and their sci-fi world designs are sleek, stripped down, and streamlined. The same can be said to their plug-and-play approach with their influences.
Imagine each specific inspiration for a piece of art is a different colored wooden block, like the alphabet ones kids play with. Do kids still play with those? I haven’t been a kid for a few years now. Anyway, artists take each of those wooden blocks and can use them however they want to build their own art. Some might carve the blocks into new shapes, some might smash the blocks to pieces and then glue together something new from the broken shards.
But movies like Oblivion and Equilibrium feel like they take those blocks and do little more than put them next to and on top of each other. The best thing they can come up with from their influences is just a bigger block.
I think this kind of mindset is what people are trying to get across when they call a movie “derivative.” And I would argue Equilibrium’s sci-fi story and world does succumb to the Bigger Block problem. So, even though its themes, character arcs, and overall narrative are strongly presented, they bring hardly anything new to the table that hasn’t been better explored in better stories.
Guns, Actors, And The Smashing Pumpkins
What Equilibrium does offer up that those literary tales don’t is a bunch of cool, stupid gun fights with Christian Bale looking stupid cool. Equilibrium is at its best when it’s just being a simple but stylish action flick. It may be empty-headed action (literally at one point) but Wimmer understands how to craft gun fights that showcase unique locations or conceptually stylish sequences like the blackout shootout.
And in addition to Christian Bale, the rest of Equilibrium’s cast is doing exactly what’s asked of them and elevating the material they’ve got to work with. There really isn’t a weak link in the ensemble. The real heroes of Equilibrium are actually the casting directors. I mean, Angus Macfadyen is in this. Komodo from Warriors of Virtue! Love ‘em.
And Wimmer does take full advantage of shooting in Berlin, a place whose fascist architecture certainly helps drive home the real-world fears he’s using in Equilibrium.
Okay, I don’t know where else this can go in the script, so before we talk about Equilibrium’s release and box office and all that good stuff, I just have to make the editor do something, so bear with me while I explain some stuff real quick.
A “temp track” is a temporary music soundtrack composed of sourced music material (usually other film scores) that is used when editing footage, allowing filmmakers to have some music to work with before they have their own original score.
If you watch as many movies as I have for as long as I have, you can start to hear when an original score is trying to sound like some other familiar film music, and it’s likely they sourced that familiar film music for their temp track.
What does this have to do with Equilibrium? In case I never get the chance to illustrate this ever again, I theorize that Equilibrium used a very unique choice on its temp track: the Smashing Pumpkins song “The Beginning Is The End Is The Beginning” from the Batman & Robin soundtrack. Not the score, the soundtrack. Am I going nuts, y’all?
The Secret Success Of Equilibrium
Okay, so what happened with Equilibrium to dub it a failure? Well, it didn’t get a super warm reception from most critics at the time and currently has a 40% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes. Roger Ebert did give it three stars out of four, so if you’ve been keeping track with our videos, that’s still a half-star less than Spawn.
If you look at the basic data like Equilibrium’s U.S. theatrical release and box office take, it looks like an abject failure, opening at the #20 spot on just 301 screens in the country, well under 10% of available U.S. theater screens at the time.
Equilibrium scraped together $1.2 million at the U.S. box office and another $4.1 million internationally, making its theatrical take barely a quarter of its reported $20 million budget. Sounds like nothing but bad news, right?
Well, this is an instance where the real money had already been made before the movie ever hit a single screen. Thanks to pre-release sales in different markets around the globe, such as theatrical exhibition fees and home video contracts, Equilibrium had turned enough of a profit that the distributors, Miramax, decided to pull back on promotion and advertising, which in turn meant decreasing the number of screens the movie would play on everywhere.
Thankfully, Equilibrium seems to have left this failure behind as audiences have helped the film become pretty widely embraced. It’s not maintained as strong an effectiveness for me as time has gone on, and some of its Bigger Block problems are even more lunkheaded today, but I can still enjoy its simpler and even sillier pleasures. And I’ll take any anti-fascist action flick I can get right now.
And hey, I’ll even throw Kurt Wimmer a bone. I still say Equilibrium is his best directing effort, but he also wrote The Beekeeper last year which surprised me with how equally brazen its sociopolitical commentary was while also succeeding at being stupid and fun.
Equilibrium is stupid and fun, and that’s okay even if it’s trying to appear a whole lot smarter than it is. It’s definitely smarter than Children of the Corn.
Check out the podcast Chat Sematary where I guested on an entire episode about Kurt Wimmer’s Stephen King’s Children of the Corn. Check out the GenreVision episode on Warriors of Virtue for more of my Angus Macfadyen obsession.
And most importantly, keep coming back for more here on Giant Freakin Robot.
