It is All about the Puppy

I just watched a fascinating movie titled Equilibrium staring Christian Bales and directed by Kurt Wimmer. The film is very good. This movie was recommended me by my best friend. Directed in a style very much like The Matrix but produced with a lot less money. Equilibrium tells the story of a futuristic world where a totalitarian government has eliminated war by mandating its citizens to take a drug called Prozium. Prozium suppresses human emotions. In this way the futuristic society can eliminate aggression that could lead to war! Not only emotions have been outlaw but all form of artistic expressions of emotions has been outlaw as well. In this futuristic world emotional feelings are punishable by death.

Christian Bale plays cleric agent John Preston. His job is to arrest or kill those who would defied the law by resisting to taking the emotion suppressing drug. After Preston himself stops taking the drug he starts to experience an emotional awaking and becomes the only hope for an underground movement that seeks to overthrow the regime.

I strongly recommend that all of my online friends check this movie out. One thing that I was thinking about when I was watching this movie was how many people in our culture that are mostly likely over medicated with emotional drugs like Prozac, and how children (mostly boys) who are prescribed Ritalin in order get a desired result in behavior. Now granted we are a long ways from mandatory drugs taking to get a desired behavioral result out of every citizen. However, in the film series How Should We Then Live the late Francis A. Schaeffer pointed out that thinkers like Arthur Koestler and Kermit Krantz have suggested that a chemical agent be develop and added to drinking water to rid humanity of aggression or to control over population.[1] Maybe the movie is not all that farfetched!

Of course the most important part of the movie is the puppy (It is a guy thing). Later in the story Preston as he began to experience real human emotions for the first time that results in his attachment to a puppy that he saved from execution. I knew when the puppy licked Preston in the face that no matter how cold his heart was the puppy can melt it. And as a man I have to ask myself, “would I kick some to save a puppy?!”

[1]The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaffer: A Christian Worldview, Volume Five, A Christian View of the West by Francis A. Schaeffer. Crossway Books – [1982] – (Pages 237-238)