Whilst I enjoy looking at upcoming film announcements and keeping up with new Blu-Ray and DVD releases, I’ve always found enjoyment from getting into older films that I missed first time around. It’s kind of what led me to write about watching Oppenhemier and Barbie in February of last year – they were part of a cultural trend I had missed, so I wanted to find out more. If you’re on a strict diet of streaming video service providers, there’s a sense that you’re at the mercy of whatever they’re able to provide… but it’s also a little bit like a treasure hunt in the same way that you could lose a lot of your Saturday morning perusing the films on sale in a physical store. Online, there’s a feeling that you need to have the inclination to seek something out in the first place – which is how I ended up watching Swordfish and Equilibrium – but you can just as easily look at the front page of Prime Video or YouTube Movies and find something of interest that you otherwise might not have thought about watching. I’m going to be going into a little more detail about why I picked these two movies to critique in a moment, but sometimes it can be fun to spend time with some (let’s be honest) also-rans without the fear of cinema expense. A quick timeline places The Matrix’s release at 1999, Swordfish’s at 2001 and Equilibrium’s at 2002 (the next Matrix movie wouldn’t be released until 2003) – moving from a hacker who can make gunfights look cool, to two movies with hacking and cool gunfights respectively. It takes a special kind of dedication to watch two less-than-stellar feature films which split the appeal of Neo’s journey, but that’s why I’m here. Don’t worry about the fact that I still waited more than two decades to be done with all of this.
Swordfish and Equilibrium – the hack job
Swordfish and Equilibrium had been on my film bucket list for a while, although they don’t really have a whole lot in common. Whilst in the middle of drafting this article I tried to find out when I watched Swordfish, and I could only find a post online where I talked about it in 2018, so it’s been a minute. Anyway, Swordfish could best be described as an espionage thriller – a hacker takes a job to create a program codenamed “hydra” to take money from the government – and it caught my attention when I found that it was being produced by Joel Silver, who was the producer on the first three Matrix movies. And, you know, it’s a film about a hacker… so I thought that there might be something in there for Neo fans? Having now watched Swordfish and Equilibrium (and The Matrix), I feel as though Swordfish is the easier film to watch. Everyone can grasp the idea of the movie, and the premise had enough substance to keep me watching. That being said… outside of the producer link, it’s more like a typical thrill ride than a Matrix wannabe.
There are a bunch of scenes where keyboards are tapped and software is wrestled with, but the immediate draw comes from the back and forth between Stanley and Gabriel, our hero and villain. Motives are laid out, plans are set in motion, and then the double-crosses and trust issues begin as everything escalates to a more intense climax. It’s definitely a film that gets carried by its stars – Hugh Jackman, John Travolta and Halle Berry are all trying to do the best with what they have – but I can see why it didn’t set the world alight. Performing hacks on computers doesn’t make for exciting cinema (although you can tell that they were trying to contrive ways to make it exciting), and the plot feels increasingly daft as you quickly get the impression that this is something you don’t have to overthink.
Swordfish and Equilibrium – the emotional void
Equilibrium was a film I watched more recently, and without the producer connection it has even less in common with The Matrix, but when I first saw trailers of the film – where people were waxing philosophical, dressing sharply and having stylish dual pistol battles – it was hard not to assume that the film was influenced by “vibes” from Neo’s adventures. More directly, you could argue that Equilibrium shares themes of obedience and free will – the film takes place in a world where emotions are prohibited, art is pretty much illegal and people take injections of “Prozium” as emotional suppressants. Our hero, Preston, is someone who accidentally skips one of their Prozium doses but finds it a liberating experience and ultimately joins a resistance group. While this can be loosely compared to Neo “waking up” and joining the resistance of Morpheus, the action scenes are more directly comparable.
Instead of bullet-time and kung fu, the unique selling point is “gunkata”; fighting with firearms and calculating angles and trajectories for optimal offence. In theory, the desired result is that the expert in gunkata looks unstoppable on the big screen – dispatching enemies with style and avoiding incoming attacks. In practice, it’s a bit far-fetched. As Preston stands in place making fancy poses I couldn’t help but wonder why anyone at a distance hadn’t been able to riddle a stationery target with holes. Again, it’s something that you shouldn’t be overthinking. The story of control and free will is cute, but doesn’t have a lot of substance and feels a bit stretched; meanwhile, Swordfish just had a bit more of a compelling thriller narrative, as ridiculous as it was. Too many of the scenes of exposition in Equilibrium felt kind of uninteresting; if I watched this in a cinema I could probably feel the vibe of people stirring as they wait for the next gunkata duel.
Having time to waste
It would be easy to say that Swordfish and Equilibrium are laughable contributions to cinema – and if I was more invested in them around their original release, then I might feel more disappointed at having so much of my time wasted – but when the stakes are lower you can have some fun with films like this and enjoy them as windows into the past. I watched both movies in digital form but I wouldn’t be opposed to picking them up on disc eventually. (Update from the future: as of May 6th 2025, used Blu-Ray copies of both films are in my possession.) I can’t say that I’d be begging anyone to greenlight follow-ups to either movie, but if anybody wanted to then I wouldn’t rush to stop them either. The Matrix was something that I feel like I watched – continue to watch – to death, and Swordfish at the very least might be a serviceable palate cleanser. It doesn’t have the virtual simulation or the sharp suits, and there’s less focus on close-quarters combat, but it’s the kind of thing that I could leave playing on a second screen. Meanwhile, Equilibrium was a bit more po-faced than Swordfish and The Matrix, but it can be enjoyed as a fun series of fight scenes. Maybe both films are a waste of time that could be spent with better movies, but sometimes you’ve watched the better movies already and you’re left with time to waste – whether it’s wasted with a plucky hacker not knowing what to believe or a resistance fighter freed from emotional limbo. As always, leave a comment below if you have any thoughts about Swordfish and Equilibrium or the Matrix series, and thanks for being on board with this adventure through two smaller curios of cinema’s past.
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