Equals

The entire movie is terrible. It's like the writer thought "hey, nobody from this generation has ever seen THX 1138...I'll just steal a bunch of stuff from that!" or "hey most people have forgotten about Equilibrium, so I'll just seal a little from that and change a few things and sell it to the highest bidder!" The actors were bad. I figured that they chose emotionless actors for a reason but you could have painted a sad face on a rock and it would have been more entertaining. There is no soul to this movie. There is no intelligence to this movie. There is no originality to this movie. What was the point in making a movie that has nothing to offer?! Garbage.

I had the unfortunate opportunity of viewing 'Equals' at the Toronto International Film Festival this past weekend--and boy was it a huge let down. At a quick glance the film and its premise seemed promising, a futuristic sci-fi love story undoubtedly drawing inspiration from dystopian classics such as 1984 and The Giver. And likely, this is what tricked hundreds of film enthusiasts (admittedly, myself included) into cramming into an auditorium on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. 101 minutes that no one will ever get back. The painfully slow story development coupled with terrible acting (Kristen Stewart is truly a disaster) killed all chances of 'Equals' becoming any semblance of a decent film. Incredibly melodramatic, boring, predictable, and just flat out bad. Save both your time and money, this one's not worth it.

Equals is set in a futuristic world where, inexplicably, people have decided to "do away with emotions." Of course this phrase never has any real meaning, since any kind of inclination to do anything can be counted as an emotion. So really it's a sci-fi setting to explore the practice of the suppression of emotions. A problem which has never existed. OK, before I trash the movie too much: the acting is fine, the set design and look are very good, and the world-building is excellent. But what is the story here? Two people who aren't supposed to fall in love do so anyway. Call me a cynic but I need more than that. Compare and contrast Equals with The Lobster, another sci- fi/dystopian movie about suppressing emotions. Rather, The Lobster compares the societal demand that people form couples, regardless of how dysfunctional they are, against an underground movement of people who insist that being single should not be cause for rejection by society (though the rebels go too far the other way, adopting the "no emotional connections" attitude that fits with Equals). Somehow The Lobster manages to fit an interesting and funny story into the world. Equals? It gives us practically nothing. Perhaps this is just a distillation of the concept of Forbidden Love. I really expected more.

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