prufrock5150

In the early 1930s, Ayn Rand was working on a screenplay to sell to young Hollywood that featured her signature objectivist take on totalitarian Communist societies and how they suck. Finding no success in selling it as a movie, she turned it into a novella called "Anthem," and it remains among her least-renowned pieces. My suspicion about "Equilibrium" is that Kurt Wimmer succeeded where Rand failed, and managed to get this particular brand of dystopia to screen. It is just as simplistic in its broad brushstrokes, just as childish in its dualistic treatment of the human condition, and just as rightly overlooked by the general public. Christian Bale's shocking lack of dimensionality (I assume Keanu was still locked into his Matrix contract and couldn't be bothered) paired with the outright absurd conceit of "Gun-Kata" (the comically overstated effectiveness of which is probably the singular reason to watch it) achieves an astounding lack of self-awareness which borders on self-parody.

So, *this* is what the movie of a SMB game should've looked like: Mario and Luigi, two lovable, Laurel-and-Hardy-esque plumbers from New York, take a job that involves a large, green pipe. By some unfortunate accident, they fall into the opening... only to emerge in a lush, flowering land full of verdant views and large, Alice-in-Wonderland-ish mushrooms. After meeting Toad, an ebullient native of this strange land, they learn that their princess has been kidnapped by a large, spiky-shelled creature named King Koopa. Vowing to earn their return to the home they know by rescuing this princess, Mario and Luigi overcome both the natural challenges of the environment of the Mushroom Kingdom as well as the attempts by Koopa's minions to thwart their advance. After overcoming the tests of mettle and might, and finding their way through labyrinthine castles, Koopa is defeated and the princess is found.

See now, how hard was that? The game *itself* has pretty much everything you need to make a movie about it... sure, you'd need some witty dialogue and an awful lot of special effects, but it's nothing that, say, *43 MILLION DOLLARS* couldn't do.

What you *don't* need are spurious and inane spring-loaded-rocket-jumping shoes, unnecessary connections to *wildly inaccurate* representations of evolutionary theory, awkward attempts to smoosh poor representations of unimportant baddies from every game into an hour and a half, or Dennis Hopper. They can jump high because it's a parallel universe, goombas are just creatures that evolved from whatever other creatures there were millions of years ago in that universe, and King Koopa is giant, spiky-shelled thing that looks *absofreakinglutely nothing* like Dennis Hopper. No, a spiky blond dye job on your head does not make you look like an evil reptilian tyrant - and it doesn't take the place of a shell.

Sadly, the Super Mario Bros. Movie makes the same mistake that virtually every other video-game movie has made: it flagrantly and arbitrarily makes stuff up that not only doesn't have *anything* to do with the game, but furthermore seems to perversely go so far off-course from the fun and adventurous tone of its source material as to make my childhood memories grit their teeth and softly weep.