THE NIGHTMARISH DYSTOPIAN CITES OF KURT WIMMER AND

PHILIP NOYCE

1.Introduction
The present article seeks to analyze the depictions of the totalitarian city-states that appear in two
dystopian films: Kurt Wimmer’s Equilibrium (2002) and Phillip Noyce’s The Giver (2014). The
research will emphasize the fact that these technologized metropolises, apparently created to
ensure people’s wellbeing, reveal themselves to be places of nightmare, where people are
deprived of their humanity and transformed into mindless robots. The paper intends to show that
both city-states appear as closed, segmented places that are meant to ensure the citizen’s total
compliance with the authority. The article will explore the spaces of conformism and the spaces
of death that these dystopian environments contain. The research will also show that, in contrast
with these repressive places, the two movies also depict alternative spaces of normality, where
the things that reflect humanity still exist.

2.Methodology
The research represents a comparative study of the city-states depicted in the dystopian movies
Equilibrium (2002) and The Giver (2014). The methodology is mainly based on the
characteristics of dystopias that were summarized by Angel Galdón Rodríguez in Starting to
Hate the State: The Beginning of the Character’s Dissidence in Dystopian Literature and Films
and by Radwan Gabr El–Sobky in Quest for the Impossible: Conformity and Sameness in Two
Science Fiction Dystopias: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Lois Lowry’s The
Giver (1993). The present article will show that the two city-states brought into discussion
represent dystopian urban environments whose construction, architecture and design serve the
purposes of the totalitarian power.