“Forget ‘The Matrix’! This movie will blow you away!” Quite a tagline, especially when you don’t live up to it. “Equilibrium” has only a few things incommon with “The Matrix”, but its level of quality is at best half that of the sublime “The Matrix”. The idea of “Equilibrium” is nice. In a future world, emotions are rooted out, because they are the source of war and other problems. This idea immediately raises a few problems, that are by far not solved in the film. Why a leader make his people enthousiastic about his ideas when they are not allowed to be happy or glad? How can the leader and inventor of such a system get angry and hold a grudge? Drugs are prescribed and “sense-offenders” (what a horrible term!) are hunted down by a special police force. It is the “cleric” John Preston (Christian Bale) that we follow in this film. Of course he becomes opposital to the system and tries to destroy it. So where is “The Matrix”? Maybe in the few way too fancy fighting scenes and the camera work? Oh well, “Equilibrium” is a scifi action film like you can see many these days, a weak Matrix spinnoff.