A future where the world is at peace but emotions are gone; war is a distant memory, and so is music, art and poetry. Here, emotion is illegal and feeling is a crime punishable by death. Clerick John Preston (Christian Bale) is the government agent responsible for destroying those who resist the rules, but forced to kill one of his own agents, he begins to question everything. Now the man who has been trained to enforce the strict laws, suddenly becomes the only person capable of overthrowing it.