Hacker Cinema
Equilibrium
2002 · Film · 107 min
Directed by Kurt Wimmer
In a dystopian future, a totalitarian regime maintains peace by subduing the populace with a drug, and displays of emotion are punishable by death. A man in charge of enforcing the law rises to overthrow the system.
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34 comments on Hacker News
Reminds me of the movie Equilibrium. And we won't even get Gun Katas.
"But I being poor, have only my dreams. I lay my dreams upon your feet. Tread lightly, for you tread on my dreams."
This <SUDO> keyword hack reminds me of some old SciFi films (such as: The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Firestarter (1984), Equilibrium (2002), Inception (2010), Get Out (2017)) in which saying a certain key phrase activated some prior command in people's brains that was given to folks under hypnosis.
Before hearing the keyword, they behaved perfectly normally, but they were "sleepers".
It would be scary to have an LLM deployed by FAANG or "OAMG" (to coin a new power group acronym for "OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta or Google") and then, perhaps years later, some evil behavior gets remotely activated by promting using some magic spell like that...
From wikipedia surveillance movie list, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_featuring_surveillance, these might interest a tech audience:
Antitrust (2001) Anon (2018) Closed Circuit (2013) Eagle Eye (2008) Equilibrium (2002)
Isn't that from 2002?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equilibrium_(film)
Onscreen and textual body armor is plot armor, metaphorically speaking. If the depiction of the armor doesn’t make sense, the audience’s suspension of disbelief will suffer to a degree due to the Dunning–Kruger effect among those with knowledge of the domain, or that same effect may be canceled out by the so-called rule of cool.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plot_armor
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotArmor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleOfCool
The best/worst example of this I can think of is the Christian Bale movie Equilibrium (2002), where Bale’s main character doesn’t even wear armor at all, instead favoring some kind of gi or frog uniform from what I can tell. The gunkata “firearm martial art” conceit hand waves some of that away as its practitioners supposedly being much less likely to be in the line of fire, but it ends up being a bit too much like literal plot armor to be believable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frog_(fastening)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_collar
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/Equilibrium
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equilibrium_(film)
> Angus Macfadyen's character, Vice-Counsel DuPont, describes the fictional fighting style gun kata in the film:
>> Through analysis of thousands of recorded gunfights, the Cleric has determined that the geometric distribution of antagonists in any gun battle is a statistically-predictable element. The gun kata treats the gun as a total weapon, each fluid position representing a maximum kill zone, inflicting maximum damage on the maximum number of opponents, while keeping the defender clear of the statistically-traditional trajectories of return fire. By the rote mastery of this art, your firing efficiency will rise by no less than 120 percent. The difference of a 63 percent increased lethal proficiency makes the master of the gun katas an adversary not to be taken lightly.
> Kata (型, かた) is a Japanese word for standard forms of movements and postures in karate, jujutsu, aikido, and many other traditional martial arts. The gun kata shown in Equilibrium is a hybrid of [writer/director Kurt] Wimmer's own style of gun kata (invented in his backyard).
Gun kata is essentially a MacGuffin that takes the form of a fictional fighting technique, likely inspired by survivorship bias, but with little to no apparent basis in reality or actually existing fighting techniques, but that's not what it's for; rather, it films extremely well and sets up some decently well-done worldbuilding alongside some decently believable fighting sequence set pieces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MacGuffin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_piece
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_fu
> Anthony Leong wrote of the gunfights in A Better Tomorrow,
>> Before 1986, Hong Kong cinema was firmly rooted in two genres: the martial arts film and the comedy. Gunplay was not terribly popular because audiences had considered it boring, compared to fancy kung fu moves or graceful swordplay of wuxia epics. What moviegoers needed was a new way to present gunplay—to show it as a skill that could be honed, integrating the acrobatics and grace of the traditional martial arts. And that's exactly what John Woo did. Using all of the visual techniques available to him (tracking shots, dolly-ins, slo-mo), Woo created beautifully surrealistic action sequences that were a 'guilty pleasure' to watch. There is also intimacy found in the gunplay—typically, his protagonists and antagonists will have a profound understanding of one another and will meet face-to-face, in a tense Mexican standoff where they each point their weapons at one another and trade words.
Tangentially related:
> Why “Cool” Military Gear Never Actually Works [video]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42285468
History should have taught us that the answer is no, the solution is not less freedom.
It does make me want to watch the movie Equilibrium though.
One man's legitimate is other's nefarious. One man's good is other's bad.
Who decides this? Can we apply laws to thoughts or plans? Should we fund research for making Minority Report a reality or increase "proactive policing"?
How to keep people safe while letting all information free? Can we educate everybody about good/bad, legitimate/nefarious so everybody stays on the same page forever? Shall we instrument this education with drugs to keep people in line like the movie Equilibrium?
Questions, questions...
I get the sense that you would like some adult themes, but not too slow?
Top of my mind (and in no specific order) would be:
- Dark City
- The Thirteenth Floor
- City of the Lost Children
- Tron (original and maybe new one)
- Interstellar
- Inception
- A Clockwork Orange
- Her (very relevant to our times)
- Dune (2021 version)
- Brazil
- The Martian
- Children of Men
- Edge of Tomorrow (most like Marvelverse on this list but still very good)
- Moon
- Twelve Monkeys
- Upgrade
- The Fifth Element
- Contact
- Okja
- District 9
- Predestination (very relevant to our times)
- Serenity (but might need some prep from the tv show before watching)
- World on a Wire
- The Abyss
- Minority Report (very relevant in our times)
- The Fly
- Videodrome
- Equilibrium
- Strange Days
- The Andromeda Strain (relevant after Covid)
- eXistenZ (trippy but I loved it when it came out and was only around your sons age)
- In Time (interesting class dynamics on display)
- Enemy Mine
- Franklyn (some interesting takes on mental illness)
- The Arrival
I love this particular topic, and it’s been something I’ve been following for a while now. It became mainstream to talk about it around 2014 or so, but I first noticed it emerge as a cultural trend in 2002. My personal pet theory is that the vicious, aggressive car style emerged out of the post-911 era after the buildup to the War in Afghanistan and the eventual Iraq War. In other words, I’m convinced that this car style arose in the 2000s out of the cultural militarization in response to 9/11, which led to beefed up and weaponized hardware for military and civilian vehicles in these conflicts. When these conflicts first began, I remember seeing firsthand how this war aesthetic began to bleed into popular culture. One of the first films I recall seeing minor, but aggressive car mods prominently used on screen reflecting this aesthetic was "Equilibrium" (2002). I think from there, it proceeded to spill out into the commercial car market.
Oh, thanks for the recommendation on Equilibrium. Somehow that one went under my radar until now.
Will check it out next Movie night.
Looooove Dark City!
But let’s not forget the movie that was right after The Matrix but also much better: Equilibrium
Do you watch content more than once?
Just curious because I tend not to (except for Equilibrium, of course).
I've heard most things worth watching are still out there later on, maybe just keep the links.
Think about the one in the movie Equilibrium. You need to suppress somehow the the need to be an asshole with lawnmower or untrained dog. Or with a masculine motorcycle with super loud exhaust. Or listen too loud to some tasteless music.
> Never heard of this writer [...] before.
Oh my. Wow. That's... huge for you. How exciting!
He's famous enough that IIRC The Simpsons once made a joke about "The ABCs of Science Fiction" where the gag was that the really nerdy kid (I'm forgetting his name—not Millhouse, the other one who wasn't as prominent a character) subverted it by swapping the usual "Bradbury" for "Bester"—as in Alfred Bester, another very-well-regarded author who's not nearly as well-known outside of sci-fi as Bradbury is. Bradbury's one of those rare crossover authors who also gets claimed by the "literary" side of things. (the A is Asimov, and the C is Clarke, of course)
His most-referred-to work is the novel Fahrenheit 451, which has had a couple film versions made, and inspired a ton of other works—see, for a very direct example, the Christian Bale film Equilibrium. The contraband-burning "firemen" and full-wall TVs from F451 are often referenced, but it's got a lot going on. It's also one of those books with a very famous opening sentence.
[edit: a couple examples of references include the first in-game numeric code in some games—I think several that Looking Glass worked on, but also sequels to some of them by other studios—being "451". The Deus Ex series likes to do this, for instance. Then there's the unofficial but somewhat widely-implemented HTTP status code "451", which denotes unavailability for political—i.e. censorship—reasons]
Other major novels include Something Wicked This Way Comes and Dandelion Wine.
He wrote a fairly famous short story collection that functions something like a concept album—it's sometimes classed as a kind of structurally-unconventional novel, in fact—in that all stories are related by a setting (Mars), usually have a similar mood, and exist in some kind of rough shared universe, you might say, though they don't exactly form a single, solid narrative. It's titled The Martian Chronicles. Which stories it includes vary slightly with different editions, but any of them would be fine for a first read. It had a point-n-click adventure video game made, based on it (the game's not exactly an excellent example of the genre, and is probably not worth tracking down—and yes, I played it a lot back when it came out).
He wrote tons of other short stories, largely, but not exclusively, sci-fi. I've elsewhere on this page linked to a pair of anthology volumes which, between them, contain 200 distinct short stories, and those are not all the ones he wrote.
He's unusually literary for a sci-fi author, which you may or may not consider to be a good thing. There's not much action in The Martian Chronicles, for instance, and the emotional climax of one story comes when a character recites a Byron poem (text reproduced fully in the story). Much of what's so great about his work is what an outstanding crafter-of-sentences he was, and how well he communicated sensation through language. The mood-pallete he works with features emotions mostly in the longing and melancholy spectrum, which he uses with such facility that the sly bastard can make you feel homesickness for a future—that will never exist! His prose is, to say the least, uncommonly good for genre fiction, and especially for sci-fi from the time period his most well-known works come from.
> > Published in Playboy.
> Is this correct?
It's not unusual for well-regarded sci-fi stories—among other kinds of literature—from a certain time span to have been first published in Playboy. The "I read it for the articles!" joke had some truth to it because, for a long while, that could semi-plausibly be true. A quick check finds that, for example, the title story of the Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. short story collection Welcome to the Monkey House was first published in Playboy. A little surprising that that was the case, for those who weren't aware of Playboy's role in fiction publishing, but actually not uncommon.
And into the rabbit hole of gun kata scenes I go. Equilibrium is such an underappreciated movie.
Reminds me of a scene 'Killed for Reading' from the movie Equilibrium.
Partridge: Don't you see, Preston? It's gone. Everything that makes us what we are, traded away.
John Preston: There's no war. No murder.
Partridge: What is it you think we do?
John Preston: No. You've been with me. You've seen how it can be, the jealousy. Rage.
Partridge: A heavy cost. I pay it gladly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJf9Pf9rjO4
Sounds like the movie Equilibrium:
In an oppressive future where all forms of feeling are illegal, a man in charge of enforcing the law rises to overthrow the system and state.
"We" can be easily considered a prequel to the "Equilibrium" movie
Remember the movie Equilibrium? Before anyone gets too excited, it's wise I believe to live by the idea: Don't cheer a powerful tool that you would not want your worst enemy using against you, or in ways with which you do not agree.
Does https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Lojban/Culturally_neutral or https://wiki.c2.com/?CulturallyNeutralLanguage answer your question?
From the second link:
> The only thing that characterizes a logical language, like LojbanLanguage, is that it's unambiguous from a structural standpoint. It seems that Lojban is just as expressive as any other human language, with the same capacity for overstatement, understatement, irony, metaphor, simile, pun, etc. A lot of famous works of fiction have been translated into Lojban by enthusiasts.
Your concerns have been brought up and explained in part by the two links above, and in the Wikipedia article I linked to. Allow me to quote some parts from it:
> The removal of grammatical ambiguity from modification [...] seems to heighten creative exploration of word combination. [...] Other areas of possible benefit are (surprisingly in a 'logical' language) emotional expression. Lojban has a fully developed set of metalinguistic and emotional attitude indicators that supplant much of the baggage of aspect and mood found in natural languages, but most clearly separate indicative statements from the emotional communication associated with those statements. This might lead to freer expression and consideration of ideas, since stating an idea can be distinguished from supporting that idea. The set of possible indicators is also large enough to provide specificity and clarity of emotions that is difficult in natural languages.
> The language was built to attempt to remove some limits on human thought; these limits are not understood, so that the tendency is to try to remove restrictions whenever we find the language structure gets in our way. You definitely can talk nonsense in Lojban.
Anyway, you can decide to be ambiguous if you wish to do so, it is perfectly possible. Do not worry, it will not turn our society into something similar to the movie Equilibrium. I think the word "logic" makes people jump to similar conclusions.
That's also a major (and non-spoiler, if you're familiar with films at all) plot point of Equilibrium.
> Many will resist, so we have to keep our goal a secret.
This is not democracy. Every dictatorship begins with "I know better what is good for you than you do".
You should watch movie "Equilibrium" with Christian Bale. I don't think you really want that, it only sounds good in theory.
i wonder what's their long term plan is.
as long as they stick to being rich and stay out of our lives, i guess they'll be ok.
if they actually manage to take over some major power or gain major political power to suppress us, well, that could/would end badly, unless they manage to convert the world. im really interested to learn more about their philosophy and their inner workings - sad they're so secretive - that only gives more weight to the suspicion that they're a malevolent organization, especially if what the news portrays is true.
sort of reminds me of the movie equilibrium.
If you're adding (the excellent) Equilibrium, I'd say V for Vendetta too due to its influence on "Anonymous". And Fight Club because of what their end goal is.
That said, I can still remember seeing eXistenZ in the cinema:
>Death to the demoness, Allegra Geller.
For action I would add Equilibrium (it has a cyberpunk feel to it) as well as the other movie he director did that I can't recall.
Also Existenz which has a female programmer and predates the Matrix and Inception.
Stargate. District 9. Inception. Equilibrium. Mad Max: Fury Road. Moon. Edge of Tomorrow.
Edit: The Man From Earth if you can dig independent cinema.
Not only dodging bullets, they also have this: http://forgifs.com/gallery/d/198537-1/One-bullet-left.gif
I think, this game could make sense if player's arms (and preferably the whole body), were simulated biomechanically correct (at least to some extent) so you had to move your guns and your body efficiently saving milliseconds for doing stuff like in [2] (This is a screenshot from the movie Equilibrium. I'm not a fan if the movie, but the "novelty" of Superhot could be justified only in a combat like that). But such game would probably require very strange controls, making it completely unplayable for most of its target audience.
[2] http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-dDg50vH76yU/TjSbzw9G-TI/AAAAAAAABP0/wHFfZhCeiaY/s1600/equilibrium1.jpg
Reminds me of the film Equilibrium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equilibrium_(film) very imposing building!
Ever see the movie 'Equilibrium'..? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equilibrium_%28film%29
I think we need to make changes to how we live our lives before we resort to using drugs if we can avoid it. What's next? Dieting drugs in our water?
I don't think I need to mention 1984 by George Orwell, but you might be interested in the movie Equilibrium which has a similar theme: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0238380/
I know lot’s of really dumb geeks that are into sci-fi because they can’t function in society. I also know several highly intelligent people who simply don’t want to function in society and happen to like sci-fi. It can be difficult for outsiders to separate these groups, especially because the less intelligent geeks try and mask their faults. It's something like the Bulb problem where it's hard to tell if someone is actually highly intelligent or just acts differently than you do.
There is still a shared context among the geek community. I think Equilibrium was the most emotionally moving movie I have ever seen yet I have little interest in seeing it again, others just like the gun play and will watch it constantly. But, such distinctions are only relevant once you have seen the movie. Stepping back a few years and Blade Runner has the same dichotomy of people who like and or obsess over the movie and those who simply reacted strongly to it. (Now add Dune, Enders Game, Stranger in a Strange Land, etc.)
PS: The number of times you have seen each of the Star Wars films is probably a good metric for this. (Not to insult Star Wars.)
This makes me think of the movie Equilibrium -- a futuristic dystopia where the people are forcefully placated via drugs:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0238380/
"we can reasonably presume that the author means 'needlessly inefficient.'"
Well, even that's wrong. If there was no need at all, then it wouldn't be done that way.
I do this stuff for movies I watch all the time: "Well, Morpheus didn't know any better about the humans-as-batteries, and didn't understand how computing power might be a more reasonable use," and "Equilibrium might be set farther in the future than it seems to be, which would explain how things could have gone this far." When you have to fix up what a columnist really meant, I think that's a sign that something is wrong, and I agree with the your parent poster that this columnist either doesn't understand what he's talking about or is writing for effect without regard to accuracy.
still a few more (some are in the works)
* Stargate
* "startup.com" - about the formation of 'govworks.com' i wonder what these guys think about Obama.
* Takedown - 'Kevin Mitnick's story'
* Serenity
* Star Trek: the Voyage Home
* The Last Starfighter
* Johnny Mnemonic
* Short Circuit 1 & 2
* Crest of the Stars (anime)
* Fahrenheit 451
* Equilibrium
* Batman (begins, dark night, the tim burten one)
* Edward Scissor Hands
* Space Balls
* Avalon ( http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/movie/decade/2000-current/avalon/#comments)
* LAIN: The Serial Experiments (anime)
* Cherry 2000
* Dune
* Ender's Shadow (in the works)
* Ender's Game (in the works)
* Diamond Age (in the works for sci-fi, 'a young girls illustrated primer')
* The Arrival
* The Terminator 1,2,3
* The Sarah Conner Chronicles
* D.A.R.Y.L
* Flight of the Navigator
* Explorers
* AI
* Batteries Not Included
* Blade Runner
* IRobot
* Appleseed (anime)
* Bubble Gum Crisis (anime)
* Ergo Proxy (anime)
* Virtuosity
* Metropolis (all of them are good)
* The Last Exile (anime)
* Cherry 2000
* Robocop (this so hold up)
* Primmer
* Probe ( the TV series, it took me 3 months to find the copies of this Issac Asimov based TV series on ABC ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probe_(TV_series)
* Infest Wisely
* Logan's Run
* Planet of the Apes
* Star Trek: First Contact
* CQ ( if you get it, you'll get why this is a hacker movie , 'la resistance')
* Amelie
* 2046
* Trigun (anime)
* Escaflone (anime)
* Tank Girl
* Twelve Monkeys
* THX 1138
* Bicentennial Man
* The Philadelphia Experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philadelphia_Experiment_(film)
* Seaquest ( some episodes )
* Strange Days ( new yeas hacker style )
* Freejack