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.

Equals-360P

Equals

This movie is boring - despite having 2 famous young stars not enough happens. The vaguely familiar plot is about an emotionless world. Hence the emotionless acting and bland faces. At first it's interesting to see the futuristic settings. Later as the 2 infected leads discover sex there seems to be little emotion or romance or passion. Just as cold with emotion as without. What happens is predictable - an attempted cure and escape. This movie lacks the inventiveness and creativity of the older sci fi movies like Soylent Green, Planet of the Apes, Logan's Run - the list goes on. Give this one a miss even if you are a fan of K Stew of Nicholas Hoult.

The intensity of build up emotions in this movie, wow. I mean, kristen had a long line of bad reviews on being emotionless, yet in this movie with the restrictions of having emotions, she showed so much that it sometimes choked me. Nicolas and kristen had crazy mad chemistry. I don't speak for all, but as a person who enjoys movies like "Les Miserables" or "The Danish Girl" which speaks the language of emotions intensely, this film speaks that same type of appreciation of emotions. So if you find highly emotional films as boring, then this movie isn't for you. If you are looking for sci-fi, this isn't it. It rests in a sci-fi environment but it feeds on passion. Regardless the similarity with other films, that don't matter to me - i have watched whatever films said to be similar to, yet it doesn't ring-a-bell to me because the focus plot of this compared to those are totally different (at least to me). Highly recommended for the love of art!

Now look, there really is no excuse for this kind of dull and unrewarding kind of movie making. As is so often the case the production values are excellent (they've really got that stuff down to a fine art these days) But there in lies the problem - it's all style over content. And that makes it all the worse for it offers some promise in the early stages. - Purely because of the production values one can be forgiven for expecting more from the story. - There was certainly plenty of opportunity for expansion. The ideas in the film have all been done before and far better. The ending felt like a cop-out and an empty gesture at best.

This is SUCH a tired theme... sterile emotionless future society, yet two people are different, fall in love, and fight the system... When George Orwell did it in "1984" it was still reasonably fresh, but that was almost 70 years ago. "Equals" stars Nicholas Hoult (the creepy kid from "About a Boy" grown up, and even creepier) and Kristen Stewart (known catatonic) really have no chemistry and the movie gives them no reason to be together except they're both "different." Watching on DVD, I saw a lot of visual "banding" issues, and the audio was largely, well, inaudible. And this universe is all touchscreens and barcode scanners that constantly ping and whoo, which becomes really grating even 10 minutes in... ick. Instead of this, I'd suggest "Gattaca" -- http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/ -- That was 20 years ago, and the premise was already getting threadbare by then, but at least there are some interesting stakes and twists and performances from Jude Law, Alan Arkin, Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke. Or maybe "The Island" -- http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0399201/ -- yes, Michael Bay, so plenty o' 'splosions, but at least it's a decent premise and has lots of good twists. Even good old "Logan's Run" -- http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074812/ -- handles this material in a more interesting manner -- it's pretty cheesy in terms of effects and costumes (it was 40 years ago so cut it some slack), but much more fun. The commentary on the disc tries to position the film as some great love story that just happens to be set in this cliché future, but there's almost nothing there. Skip it, or at least lower your expectations.

101 minutes of shakycam, hyper closeups, out of focus shots, obstructed views, and other nausea and headache inducing camera-work. This is the type of film that you'd expect from drunk camera persons, and adolescent editors. If you taped a camera on top of a bobbelhead, this is what it would look like. The real surprise is that movies like this are still being funded. A brief look at the earning of the film suggests they didn't want a return on their investment. Its very rare to see a shakycam flick turn a profit. And its getting more difficult because the audience has learned to always get a refund from a shakycam movie. The camera-work destroys the movie viewing experience. At no point during this film will you forget that you're watching a movie and get pulled in to the story. While some viewers are more tolerant than others to the nausea cam effects, many who try to watch this will become physically ill. I've seen better work from pre-teens with camera phones. Shakycam destroys movies like singing off key destroys music. Amateurs should stick to YouTube.