Equilibrium

The fighting design in Kurt Wimmer’s 2002 film, the gun kata, is Wimmer’s own. “I created the gun kata right here in the office where I’m writing every day”, he says. He names Hong Kong action as his starting point: two hands firing two guns stopped there, and he wanted to know what lay past it. He grants it is not realistic; he defends the musicality between camera and action. The film’s bad luck sits there too. Wimmer says that after Columbine the MPAA tightened trailer rules until no gun could be shown, and “they didn’t know how to sell it”. Made for about $20 million, it played 301 screens at its widest in the United States, took $541,512 on opening weekend and closed its domestic run at $1.2 million. He now says critics hated it but the public loved it. Among the forbidden objects Preston seizes is a book of poems by W. B. Yeats, so art reaches the screen as one held object, not an abstraction. Wimmer credits Christian Bale with saving many fight shots by landing them in a single take. A good fit if you take the gun kata as choreography not realism and come for the postures. Not for anyone expecting novelty from the premise; Libria is a familiar variation on the book burning state.