author1995

I was rather sceptical when I heard about the movie's monster parade, but they are meshed into one piece astonishingly well, I think - Dracula was killed and accepted vampirism rather than die, the gypsy's vowed to stop him and thus took onto themselves the curse of the werewolf (if you look closely, you notice that all werewolves apart from Van Helsing are family members, even if they need to be bitten to get infected), because only a werewolf can stop Dracula (that is also the reason why the gypsy's need to stop the count before they are allowed into Heaven - werewolves don't look good with angels' wings, after all), and Dracula hires Frankenstein because he wishes his children to live, a feat that only the obsessed Doctor can accomplish. Van Helsing as Dracula's killer only makes everything come full circle.

That's the hit, now the miss. The vampires' ball is set magnificiently (re also Polanski's Fearless Vampire Killers and the ball there), but it's missed opportunities all along. Much more could have been made of masks. Much, much more of Carl's fool costume. And the weird artistes were not used to their full effect. The entire ball should by rights have been one of the high points of the movie, instead it was a rather short quote and a waste of space that gets only worse when you consider how much money must have gone into it. A pity, really.

Although Equilibrium certainly takes quite a bit of its ideas from Bradbury, the focus is the other way round: in Fahrenheit, thought is forbidden and people are encouraged to indulge in excesses, particularly emotional ones like window-smashing and tv families. In Equilibrium, emotion is forbidden, and people are forced to only think, but not feel. Interestingly enough, Fahrenheit doesn't need a drug to make people emotional - that's part of people's psyches. But Equilibrium needs the drug, because what the Tetragrammaton - their control organisation - wants to force on people is something other than human. It's reminiscent of Huxley's Brave New World and its some drug, actually - only the points of the compass are reversed again: people take soma when reality becomes too much to bear in BNW, people take their shots in Equilibrium so that they can bear an emotion-free reality in the first place. All in all, I think Equilibrium really is more than a cheap copy of Fahrenheit and Brave New World, it's a look at the other alternative - a thoroughly "adult" society instead of an infantile one.