It's a good idea to take your "interval". If you don't, you will start collecting knick-knacks and dress like beatniks. Then you will be shot, or executed in a furnace. Yet quite a few go down this path, including Bale's own wife (Maria Pia Calzone) and his enforcer partner Sean Bean. Bale has two pre-adolescent children, a Poindexter-type boy (Matthew Harbour) and a blank doll of a daughter (Emily Siewert).
Inevitably, Bale misses an interval, and unsurprisingly decides that he likes not being drugged. But his occupation conflicts with his new outlook, and he is soon suspected of being a traitor, especially since he keeps murdering policemen and their easily shattered helmets. He also apparently falls for Emily Watson, a moderately attractive woman who won't take her interval and is scheduled for execution.
Bale joins the Underground, and is convinced by their leader that he must use his position to assassinate Father (Sean Pertwee), the somnolent and ubiquitous face of the oppressive government.
How others will see it. Equilibrium was a box office bust and was ignored by the various film festivals. It generally drew poor reviews. Roger Ebert gave it three stars, but that was likely from his poll of preview attendees, rather than an honest appraisal.
Nonetheless, the movie became a sensation as a video release. Bale's subsequent turn as Batman undoubtedly brought further interest. Today at imdb.com, it has a whopping 230K user votes. The user ratings are high at 7.6 out of 10, and even women over 45 grade it 7.5, presumably won over by Bale's deep voice and unflinching dispatch of myriad hapless bad guys.
How I felt about it. It's all too easy to note the humongous plot holes of Equilibrium. The most blatant is Bale's slaughter of a couple hundred armed henchmen, most of whom stand around waiting for their turn to be shot or butchered. He's willing to kill hundreds to achieve his ends, but not a cute puppy dog! One has to draw the line somewhere.
Then there's the notion of a totalitarian government that depends upon the entire population injecting themselves in the neck several times daily with a drug that turns them into Vulcans. Yet the drug doesn't seem to work on Bale's new partner Taye Diggs, who is cocky and smug throughout the film. Bale's boss, Angus Macfadyen is blatantly passionate. And there's no way to tell if the drug hasn't been injected? The empty cartridges aren't returned?
If Macfadyen knew that Bale was the "traitor", then why order a search of his apartment? Why would those not taking the injection collect antiques likely to get themselves executed? More to the point, why would anyone believe this is a great film, when the plot is a pastiché of various sources such as 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and a multitude of cheap 1970s Kung Fu flicks.
Apparently, viewers put themselves into the shoes of Christian Bale, then revel in his slaughter of faceless multitudes on his way to putting the uppity Diggs in his place, and deep sixing the Fearless Leader. This is the same mindless thrill that the equilibrium drug seeks to avoid. There's irony in there somewhere.
The only way that Equilibrium could work is as a comedy. Unfortunately, it is merely a formulaic science-fiction action movie.