The Experiment
|
List Price: Our Price: $15.99 You Save: $13.96 (47%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $5.86 (click here) Category: DVD See more DVD releases |
|---|
Canada
Movie Reviews of The Experiment
Movie Review: The feel good movie of the year!!
Summary: 3 Stars
LOL, okay maybe not the feel good movie of the year. "This movie is a trip" said the Blockbuster clerk when I was buying this, and yeah I agree. I don't know quite what to make of this movie. I have my undergraduate degree in psychology so I'm familiar with some historical psychological experiments gone wrong. In addition to the psychology experiment many of the reviews reference that took place in 1971 @ Stanford there have been other experiments conducted that show how shockingly horrible humans are capable of acting when given power over others. When you think about how something like this is not only completely possible but goes on every day in every country in one way, shape or form, then the movie becomes less enjoyable. Plus, I could have done without all the male nudity - where's the women's prison version?! ;)
At least the movie was not grotesque. I was concerned after I had purchased it that it might turn out to be some torturous gruesome flick, but it isn't. It's more along psychological lines of humiliation, torture and power.
One thing that I thought they missed on this movie was the background of at least the main "prisoner" and the main "guard" which have the power struggle during the movie. It was explained that these two people were selected for the experiment and put on opposite sides because they wanted the confrontation between them, but we don't have any background on their personality development so we can understand why they have fallen into these roles. And the side story we get about the main character's girlfriend is just silly and really adds nothing to the storyline.
Movie Review: Ultimately entertaining, but oh, so slow to begin !!
Summary: 3 Stars
A good friend lent me this DVD and raved about it's gripping & chilling content, and it's origins from the real life Stanford Prison Experiment....however, I came away somewhat dissapointed with this tale.
The first ninety minutes of the film are rather tepid and lacklustre with a uneven amount of character development, and the initial few days of incarceration are not exactly filled with mounting tension. After several false starts ,the conflict swiftly picks up between the antagonistic lead prisoner (an undercover reporter) and a power crazed & sadistic guard. Then, the film takes on quite a captivating and claustrophobic mood, and brutally violent in its conclusions.
Typical of German cinema, "The Experiment" has a rather surreal tone to it's depiction of the sterile world of the mock jail, however I would have preferred the film to have played a few more stronger cards earlier in the piece, rather than saving them all for the final twenty minutes.
Movie Review: A Mess
Summary: 2 Stars
I'll never forget sitting in Psychology class watching this odd guy on a video. He looked kind of like that man who started the Church of satan, Anton Le Vay. His name was Phillip Zimbardo. I remember he had a series of videos, the title of them escapes me. But I do remember his most compelling video was about a famous experiment gone horribly wrong. In late summer of 1971, Zimbardo and a team at Stanford University constructed, in a basement on the Stanford campus, a makeshift prison. He then paid a bunch of subjects to live in it. The men who took part were separated into two groups, prisoners and inmates. The experiment was to last two weeks, to bad it only lasted 6 days. Soon essentially normal men, given the role of prison guards were savagely beating the inmates. Power had gone to their heads. Just like Zimbardo's ill-fated experiment, director Oliver Hirschbiegel DAS EXPERIMENT doesn't fare much better.
Set in the present, EXPERIMENT follows Tarek Fahd (Moritz Bliebtreu, Run Lola Run), a cocksure cab driver/journalist as he infiltrates a prison experiment. It all seems like a game at first. That is until the guards start beating up on the inmates, and the scientists running the experiments begin to lose control. Let the carnage begin.
I wanted so much to love this movie. The premise is there and the characters are there. A great movie is striving to break free. But alas it all fails. Weaknesses begin to show up at the beginning and the film never quite recovers. I think I know what the biggest problem is. The film bites off far more than it needs to.
This movie should have been a character study. But instead, it puts itself at a distance that is way too far away from its subjects. It meanders where it should move on. It introduces ideas when it should be building characters, and it creates subplots where none are needed.
The biggest problem with the film is a subplot introduced mere minutes after the movie opens. It occurs when Fahd's cab gets into an accident with another car. The other car's driver is Dora (Maren Eggert), a beautiful women, who falls for Fahd instantly. Then she starts showing up all over the film, taking us away from the prison. She serves no purpose. In a stronger draft of the films screenplay they would have chopped her out with extreme prejudice. But we have to suffer through endless scenes of her standing by herself, and dreaming of Fahd, and for what? I'm not sure, but if anyone figures it out, let me know.
Past the inane girlfriend, what I really wanted was focus. I wanted more from the scientists, I wanted more from the inmates, and I wanted more from the guards. Instead we get silly black and white sequences, we get government conspiracies, and we get very little about the nature of man.
On top of that the film needed to be edited tighter. The opening credit sequence feels like an eternity, and yet nothing happens. The experiment screening process meanders to the point of silliness, and the final 20 minutes just drag. With the film as it is, 90 minutes would have sufficed but at just under two hours, it becomes unbearable.
It just makes me sad that I didn't like the movie. It makes me sad, because it's a compelling premise. Why do men get violent? Does prison culture turn otherwise non-violent men into monsters? How does peer-pressure effects us? All questions are worth answering. But we get no such answers.
I wouldn't recommend you conduct DAS EXPERIMENT.
** (Out of 5)
Movie Review: Average Movie
Summary: 2 Stars
I am not sure why people write the story of the movie in their reviews instead of actually writing a review.
This movie is neither good nor bad; the acting is good in most parts but overall this is a normal movie in terms of story and sript.
To compare it to "Run Lola Run" is unfair and if you are interested in watching more movies along the lines of human psychology I would recommend "Cube".