Equilibrium
I finally got my hands on a copy of Equilibrium and I have to say that watching Christian Bale kill people makes me hot. It's not the killing that does it but the finesse of the action. The fight scenes in Equilibrium were so good I swear you'd be dead not to enjoy them in many different ways ;). Even though I did love the movie I have a few quibbles with it.
The thing that stuck out for me in the movie is the usage of the old stereotype of women being the embodiment of emotion. The premise of the movie is a world where feeling is outlawed and the criminals are sense offenders. It's telling that the two sense offenders that impact Christian Bale's character, John, the most is his wife and his dead partner's girlfriend. The resistance is made up primarily of men (one of them being Dominic Purcell of Prison Break) but they guard stereotypically feminine things: paintings of beautiful women like the Mona Lisa and books of poetry. The women who are part of the resistance don't have speaking parts and Emily Mortimer's character as well as the John's wife are all martyrs(complete with scarlett cloaks) full of emotion and nothing else. I wouldn't go so far to say as they're characters. They're only catalysts for John's development. It would take fanfiction to make these women well-rounded. It's also telling that of John's two children who've started experiencing emotion it's the daughter who is unable to hide it. The son goes a long period of time fooling and outsmarting his father, even coming off as more devoted to the status-quo than John.
So a dichotomy is set up: Women = emotion and memory, Men = loss of emotion and selective memory used for governmental control. The point is hammered home since the head of state is called Father. The good and bad thing about the film is that it doesn't argue that an emotion based society would be preferable to the current fascist regime. That would be saying a female run soceity would be the best thing for humanity. Since the resistance is headed by a man and it's most important soldiers are men what you get is male dominant society that tries to eradicate emotion (women) versus a male dominant society that knows how to control emotion (women). Can you smell the placating of the masses of men whom this film is geared towards?
I would have been really interested in a society where Mother is the one who decrees an outlaw of emotions. That would be truly refreshing and not nearly as misogynistic.
And on a completely shallow note, I hated Emily Watson in this movie. Her make-up was awful and she looked like a low class hooker or someone who lived in my old neighbourhood. If they needed a pale British woman they should've got Samantha Morton. I think she would've risen above the martyr role that this film requires and Emily Mortimer plays so well.
The thing that stuck out for me in the movie is the usage of the old stereotype of women being the embodiment of emotion. The premise of the movie is a world where feeling is outlawed and the criminals are sense offenders. It's telling that the two sense offenders that impact Christian Bale's character, John, the most is his wife and his dead partner's girlfriend. The resistance is made up primarily of men (one of them being Dominic Purcell of Prison Break) but they guard stereotypically feminine things: paintings of beautiful women like the Mona Lisa and books of poetry. The women who are part of the resistance don't have speaking parts and Emily Mortimer's character as well as the John's wife are all martyrs(complete with scarlett cloaks) full of emotion and nothing else. I wouldn't go so far to say as they're characters. They're only catalysts for John's development. It would take fanfiction to make these women well-rounded. It's also telling that of John's two children who've started experiencing emotion it's the daughter who is unable to hide it. The son goes a long period of time fooling and outsmarting his father, even coming off as more devoted to the status-quo than John.
So a dichotomy is set up: Women = emotion and memory, Men = loss of emotion and selective memory used for governmental control. The point is hammered home since the head of state is called Father. The good and bad thing about the film is that it doesn't argue that an emotion based society would be preferable to the current fascist regime. That would be saying a female run soceity would be the best thing for humanity. Since the resistance is headed by a man and it's most important soldiers are men what you get is male dominant society that tries to eradicate emotion (women) versus a male dominant society that knows how to control emotion (women). Can you smell the placating of the masses of men whom this film is geared towards?
I would have been really interested in a society where Mother is the one who decrees an outlaw of emotions. That would be truly refreshing and not nearly as misogynistic.
And on a completely shallow note, I hated Emily Watson in this movie. Her make-up was awful and she looked like a low class hooker or someone who lived in my old neighbourhood. If they needed a pale British woman they should've got Samantha Morton. I think she would've risen above the martyr role that this film requires and Emily Mortimer plays so well.