This was very intriguing indeed.
For
a film that does not have any threat of death involved, The Stanford Prison Experiment sure did manage to keep me disturbed
enough to keep watching till the very end.
For,
it is disturbing, yes. But not in the sense that one would normally expect when
a film promises to be just that.
Based
on true events, the film is about twenty-four male students who were put into a
simulated prison environment- half of them as prisoners, and the other half as
guards- to study the psychological impact it would have on the subjects over a
period of two weeks.
And
to the surprise of Dr. Philip Zimbardo
who arranged this exercise and who assumed that this would just be another
boring two weeks spent over nothing, what transpired during the first six days
was so shocking that he had to call the whole thing off before matters got any
more out of hand.
I
found the film to be engaging and- despite being based on a real incident- it
held its own by not just playing out as a simple narration of the facts already
available.
It
has been to shot to induce enough claustrophobia into the prison scenes so that
for the length of the film, you are part of the experiment while also being
outside of it.
You
experience the dread that unlimited authority can create in the average human
mind and the copious amount of corruption that comes with power over other
humans, but at the same time, you are not able to stop yourself from feeling
ridiculous that human beings would actually allow themselves to be treated so
degradingly without a word of protest just because they have been told that there
is no way out- which I thought was a truly remarkable achievement, given (I
repeat once more) how little the stakes of actual physical harm to anyone
involved was.
The
acting is fantastic, especially of the mock guards who seem to get a little too
much into the skin of their roles. Billy
Crudup as Dr. Zimbardo does a competent job.
Overall,
I'd say, worth a watch, even if a tiny bit underwhelming on account of the
source material.
But...
but, before I finish, I cannot help but mention another film of the same kind
that I found to be much more powerful, even if not more disturbing than this
(maybe because it’s NOT completely based on a real life event. Still, a film is
a film, so)- The Wave which is a
German movie (of course, it had to be a fucking German movie!) about a high
school teacher's experiment to demonstrate to his students what life is like
under a dictatorship.
Now
THAT is one experiment where fatality cannot be ruled out. You fill innocent
minds up with enough hatred towards a particular group of persons or object,
teach them to make it their sole purpose of existence and send them on a
mission while you sit back, relax and enjoy the show (or as they so lovingly
put it in India- Mandir wahi banayenge. Of course they have another name for
such 'righteousness' in the middle east but, meh, thats common knowledge so am
not mentioning it here.)
Both
films are recommended.
Catch
the trailers here:
1 comment:
Interesting. Do read Stephen King's Apt Pupil.
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