> OK, so I saw Equilibrium last week. I enjoyed it, but I had a few problems with it. Today, I discovered that Sam had rated it, but not reviewed it, and given it four stars out of five.
>
> There are plenty of things about the movie I would like to discuss, but I'll focus on the one thing that REALLY bugs me.
>
> Near the end of the movie, the hero (I'm bad with names) "tricks" the boss guy into thinking that the hero's partner was the traitor. He gets away with this because we find out that the partner's gun was used to kill some guys in the Nether, and we are treated to a flashback to the scene where the partner offers the hero his gun, and the hero returns it, implying that this is when the switch occurred.
>
> After that point in the movie, does the hero even kill any more secret police types? The conversation where the partner gets framed implied to me that they were talking about the mysterious killings that occurred when the hero was in the Nether with the puppy, but that took place BEFORE the gun switch scene -- in fact, it was the killing that took place with the puppy that PROMPTED the massive raid in which the gun switch happened. Even the deaths of the squad members during that raid took place before the switch, as the hero was still helping the rebels to escape, and it was after these same rebels were trapped and lined up that the switch happened.
>
> So, somebody explain to me how all that stuff makes sense without time travel.
>
> Don

I just saw this last evening and had the same thought you did. The sequence seemed to be Preston killed the guards with his own weapon, Preston switches the weapons the next day (Preston has Brandt's gun; Brandt has Preston's), they run a trace on the weapon that killed the guards and it comes up Brandt's gun. But they flashback to the gun switch, implying that the murders they're discussing occurred after the gun switch when it really occurred before.

I would suggest that as a Cleric, Preston was able to edit the ballistic records to point to Brandt, but that's viewer spackle -- they movie clearly tries to make the gun switch explain Brandt's complicity in the murders.

-FP