Saw Equilibrium today, in study hall, on Moham(one m)ed's laptop.

Oh, wow. Oh, my. Oh, dear gods.

What a delicious, sexy, violent movie. It's 1984 meets The Matrix, only three times better and not as long. And it stars not only Christian Bale (why did they ever make him a blond? *drool*), but Sean Bean, Emily Watson, and some other random but quite nifty guy as well. Sean Bean! Christian Bale! *drools*

And oh, god, do the two of them do evil. Neither of them are really evil, but they do evil things and they look damn good while doing them. Oi.

The premise is thus: after WWIII, the remaining survivors of the human race are drugged up with this stuff called Prozium, which inhibits all emotion. This leads one to think that there is a plot hole, but there really isn't: everything is explained in the end. I love it when they explain everything so that stuff makes sense. It's so nice when things make sense. Anyway. Your average unfeeling citizen is subjected to motivational speeches from Father and Father's Voice (who isn't gay, just French, and named Dupont) at all hours of the day from giant hi-tech flatscreen tvs. Kinda nifty, kinda creepy. Father's Voice actually gets pretty emotional during these speeches, extolling the virtues of Prozium and how murder and dissent and war are abolished because those pesky human emotions have all been abolished. Very creepy.

Of course, there are people who don't take their daily dose of Prozium, and they're called Sense Offenders and most of them are members of the Resistance. It's the job of the Grammaton Clerics to track down sense offenders and everything that might lead a person to feel something- art, music, colorful things, shiny things. The opening scene (after Christian Bale kicks ass and takes names in a nifty gunfight) is of two Clerics burning the Mona Lisa. *shiver* Christian Bale and Sean Bean are both top notch, high ranking Grammaton Clerics- they were lots of black, get utterly spiff fight scenes, and call each other "Cleric", which just makes me shiver for a whole 'nother reason. Sean Bean gets caught feeling emotions, and Christian Bale shoots him. *sadness* Then Christian Bale forgets to take his dose of Prozium and starts to feel too, and it all goes downhill from there. (There's an incredibly pretty scene involving him tearing open his window to see a rainbow for the first time in his life that would make such an awesome desktop wallpaper...*goes off to look for screenshots*) There's a happy ending, though, even if everybody (almost) dies. There are creepy creepy children, too. Really creepy. Like, miniature Hitler kind of creepy, straight out of 1984. There's even an O'Brian in the movie, which I thought was a bit overdone, but eh, whatever.

Anyway. The Clerics are all trained in the art of the Gun Katas, or, as Oliver called it, Gun Foo. They also know how to use katanas, which was kind of random but also incredibly nifty. All the violence is graphic like the arena scenes from Gladiator (we were watching that in Latin) so there's much blood flying about and many limbs going off in random and uncomfortable directions, and the second to last 'fight' scene (in quotes because the other guy didn't get in a single hit, and Christian Bale only hit him three times total) involves some very very disgusting special effects that were entirely unnecessary but do lead you to wonder what exactly they make those katanas out of to keep them so very, very sharp.

I dunno, there's something about seeing a guy surrounded by men in body armor weilding machine guns pistolwhip them all to death without getting touched himself that's really quite impressive. Y'know the gun scene in The Matrix? So Equilibrium borrows a little bit- but the equivalent scene in this movie was five times better because a) there was no Carrie Ann Moss, b) there were no stupid non reflective sunglasses c) Christian Bale can do menacing and pyschotic so much better than Keanu Reeves (he can do just about everything so much better than Keanu Reeves can, actually...) and d) that niftyness with the clips was just cool.

Yes, yes, I still despise guns. But I still love a good, tastefully done, well executed fight scene. (The katana fight was a bit gratuitous...especially the end. He only had to hit the guy twice, really...) And there were a lot of them in this movie, because even if the violence was rather gratuitous and explicit, it wasn't sickeningly so (*coughGladiatorcough*). And the idea of Gun Foo is really quite amusing, and seeing Christian Bale go psychotic is really, really fun to watch.

They should've had him play Neo in The Matrix, they really should have. Because he can act, you know. Unlike some other male leads I could name. But he sings, he dances, he slays dragons, overthrows totalitarian societies, goes on murderous rampages, and does a pretty damn good Shakespeare, too. Really, what hasn't the man done?

Not that I'm an obsessive fangirl or anything. *coughs* Mmm, pretty...