10 Movie Dystopias To Make You Feel Better About The Current Political Hellscape
7. Equilibrium
In a lot of dystopian societies, the one thing that actually provides a little bit of hope is that even though you're living in an oppressive regime and terrible things are happening to you, you're still entitled to your own feelings, even if you aren't able to act on them. But in Equilibrium, even that has been taken away.
Under the guise of wanting to preserve peace, the government in this film has its entire society on a daily dose of a medication that suppresses their emotions. The penalty for violating this law, by skipping doses or interacting with forbidden materials (art, music, films, etc), is a summary execution, and there are super skilled police who are devoted solely to rooting out what they call Sense Offenders.
It's a pretty depressing existence, where everyone looks and acts exactly the same, and is encouraged to observe members of their community to make sure everyone is falling into line. And all of that would be bad enough, but about half way through the film, we learn that owning dogs (or pets of any kind, really) is forbidden.
What fresh hell is this?