Equals (2015)

Did you ever read “Romeo and Juliet” and think to yourself “this would be so much better if it were in a dystopian future where no one has emotions”?
No, obviously you didn’t, because that’s a stupid thing to want and should never have moved beyond anyone’s good-idea-fairy journal.

Unfortunately, someone decided to let their weird slash-fic fantasy escape the confines of their mind and now we have to live in a universe where Nicholas Hoult and Kristen Stewart had to pretend to like each other for 90 minutes, which is about three times longer than we should have had to watch.

“Equals” (2015) starred Silas (Hoult) and Mia (Stewart) as two people working for ‘ATMOS,’ some kind of historical documentation academy. Possibly on Earth, it’s pointlessly unclear.
What we do know is this: it’s an arbitrary number of years in the future, and mankind has been dissolved through war. Every single computer is a giant touch-screen slab that exists solely to narrate exposition to everyone within earshot, even though everyone who would be listening already lives in this society of zero emotion and would know all of those details.
The government is called “The Collective,” because of course it is - it’s apparently impossible for sci-fi governments to have names that aren’t stupid or telegraph impending evil. In this case, it’s just a stupid name.
A few months ago I reviewed “I Am Mother” (2019) and complimented its hard-core science fiction nature of simply telling the story without trying to explain every single detail of the backstory for the sake of world-building.
They got that wrong here. There was too much discussion of humanity’s history. We got an in-depth explanation for a disease called “Switched On Syndrome” in the first five minutes. The major medical facility was not only named, but then the computer-narrator used the acronym for it. In fact, every time the computer referenced the medical facility, it would always list the full name, then the acronym, as if all the citizens of this place had the memory capacity of a particularly stupid goldfish. The computer also spent a lot of time reminding us about the Collective’s desires for space travel and colonization, which is a concept I’m all for in general, but doesn’t actually add anything to the story and just leaves a bunch of random “HEY LOOK AT THIS” type stuff lying around, with none of it ever paying off.

Like in the book “The Giver,” everyone in this world has had their emotions blocked. Unlike “The Giver,” wherein citizens took pills that block emotions and sexual desires at puberty, the people in “Equals” were born emotionally stunted, and feeling emotions was a medical diagnosis that resulted in assisted suicide in 100% of cases, because there is no cure for the feels.

Side note: the issue of suddenly having emotions was rumored to be an infectious disease, which meant you could literally ‘catch feelings.’

So, like “Romeo and Juliet,” Silas and Mia are two people with feelings in a world where no one understands them. They planned to run away together, but things went sideways, no one communicated properly, and Silas got his emotions turned off because plot device - now there’s a cure!
Mia apparently still managed to run away, and is pregnant with Silas’s baby, so... yay?

The scenery in this movie was outstanding. I have no idea where they filmed it, but everything looked to be an actual building or facility or staircase, so that means the crew spent a fair amount of time doing site surveys to find awesome filming locations.

The soundtrack was horrible. There was some music, but there was a lot of dead silence as Silas and Mia stared at each other, or made out, or ate lunch.
And whoever did the sound-mixing should be fired - the speaking was all in mumbled whispers with the microphones stored in a closet down the hall while the music was blasted directly into your eardrums.

At one point, Mia caught a bee and said “According to the laws of physics, bees shouldn’t be able to fly. But bees don’t know this, so they do it anyway.”
Unless I’m mistaken, that was the opening text for “Bee Movie” (2007) and is an entirely unsubstantiated, unscientific claim. While it was played for laughs in its source comedy, it’s a stupid thing to include here, where there were no jokes and Mia states it as if it were somehow some deep truth of the universe.

Final quirk: during the opening sequence, we’re shown Silas getting ready for the day. Everything in his apartment, save for the bathroom unit, slid in and out of the wall. It’s the logical extreme of the Murphy bed concept.
This looked cool, until a scene about 15 minutes later where a zoom-out shot showed Silas’s apartment building, where everyone’s apartments were separated from each other by a very thin wall, which doesn’t allow anywhere for the 6+ foot long beds and dressers and tables to exist. “Defying physics” wasn’t a component of world-building in this flick, so that just means two separate design teams didn’t feel like talking.

This movie was just “Romeo & Juliet” (1595) + “The Giver” (1993) + “The Island” (2005) + “GATTACA” (1997) but worse. Read/watch any of those instead and imagine a better dystopian drama for yourself.