Rating: 
Summary: Das Experiment
Review: Few movies can truly disturb you at your core. This movie is definitely one of them. Based on an experiment conducted at Stanford University in the sixties (the outcome of which disturbed the researchers so greatly that they terminated the study prematurely), this movie goes beyond what actually occurred and explores the worst-case scenario-what could happen had the researchers lost complete control.
What is most disturbing about this movie is that it forces you to examine yourself. The purpose of both the experiment and the movie is to get the audience to ask the question, "Would I act like that if I was in the same situation?" Both guards and prisoners were normal individuals prior to the onset of the experiment. Psychological tests were given to evaluate whether they exhibited abnormal propensities for violence, authoritarianism, and mental stability. All were given a clean slate. Once you realize that most people would and do behave in similar fashion under the same stressors (except you of course), the movie takes on a new level of horror as it becomes all the more real.
Das Experiment is easily one of the best movies made on the subject of authoritarianism, but stands apart from most in that it gives the audience keen insight into some of the potential causes of prisoner abuse-a topic proven to be ever relevant (e.g. Abu Ghraib). The power of expectation to shape our behavior cannot be underestimated. It can transform a delinquent child into an honor role student (see the Pygmalion Effect) and turn a human being into a monster.
Rating:
Summary: It was so intense I physically reacted
Review: I have never seen any movie in my entire life that layered emotional strain and suspense as effectively and believably as this movie. One thing naturally lead to another in this suspense-thriller about how power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The movie is penetrating, thought provoking, and unsettling. It's one you can't walk away from and just forget about. Tremendously acted and directed, this German film rivals such American blockbusters as "The Green Mile" or "The Shawshank Redemption." See it. Be entertained, if you can take it.
Rating:
Summary: OUTSTANDING MOVIE
Review: I just viewed this movie on showtime and it is a very powerful
and intense movie based on true facts. almost unbelieveable
I recommend this to persons over 17 I beleive it has an R
rating. I have purchased this video so that I can view it over
and over .
Rating:
Summary: RIDICULOUSLY intense!
Review: I saw this movie initially through a free screening. I must say that I had not heard of it ahead of time, nor knew much going in (besides the fact that it would be in German and that it looked pretty cool on its website). I did not really know too much of what to expect, and I was not thrilled that I would have to read subtitles. I was blown away! This movie is such a rollercoaster. It is the epidemy of a psychological thriller. Also, it is just such an interesting and disturbing view on human behavior. I don't know if I would have even seen this movie if it hadn't been for the free screening, but I have already paid and seen it again with another friend. All that I can say is that it is a really good movie that will stay with you afterwards. (see this movie!!!)
Rating:
Summary: Amazing but violent
Review: I watched this film while living in Germany. It is an amazing psychological journey. It dose have some vvery graphic and extreme violence but it is not necesarily gratuitous. The violence is simply the result of the psychological stress put on the characters. This movie will leave you questioning your view of humanity. I recommend it especially to psychology students,professors, or anyone interested in social psychology. The moments of humor are poignant. Moritz Bleibtrau does an astounding job as the lead character!
Rating:
Summary: Nightmare of human nature
Review: I will always remember this movie for its unflinching gaze at what can happen when good research subjects go bad. Watching this, one quickly forgets that these are actors playing at the "let's pretend we're in prison" game, and the shattering realism of it all is enough to make you squirm, if not scream. Apparently, in Germany, where the movie was watched widely, some viewers ended up throwing up or fainting in horror.
This isn't, of course, your average B-movie horror we're talking about either. The horror is in what people can do to one another, if given enough stimulus and just enough power. Stanford University experiment on which the movie is supposedly based actually was terminated before it escalated as much as the situation in the movie does. So it's all too easy to imagine how the events would have unfolded if somebody wise didn't just say NO. Plenty of characters in Das Experiment probably would have wished it was so.
The movie is very lucid, realistic, and keeps you at the edge of the seat at all times. Bleibtrau who also played Lola's boyfriend in Run Lola Run is an astonishing actor, projecting an image of an average man in an abnormal situation, but also someone who is extraordinary enough to be able to deal with it and survive it. The story of experiment is interwoven with the patches of love affair that he initiates shortly beforehand with a woman who crashes into his car. The movie is contemplative and quiet when it needs to be - frantic when it gains momentum. Great techno music serves as an accompaniment (although I didn't recognize the bands they used).
Another great German flick... I hope they keep'em coming!
Rating: 
Summary: A Mess
Review: 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)
Rating:
Summary: The best cult movie of 2001all around the world
Review: If you think that all the theorems about the final aspects of the violence had been expossed before, watch this movie.
In the best tradition of the greatest films that explored this same object, let`s name the obligated references Shock corridor (Fuller),The chase (Artur Penn) , Straw dogs (Sam Peckinpah), Even dwarfs started small (Werner Herzog )The clockwise orange (Kubrick) , Cuckoo`s nest(Foreman) , The brutalization of Franz Blum (Reinhard Hauff) , Do the right thing (Spike Lee), Trainspotting (Danny Boyle), and The believer (Henry Bean),the insight landscape made by this work is really absorbing . The camera work is exceptional. The performances and thge script are superb. With special mention to both of the meaning roles. The concept of authority, and the fact of owning altough fifteen days , and how this circunstance slowly permeates the shadow places of the soul, showing how the human being can become in a true animal, just for that little amonut of power who seems to design a God`s messenger, or any religion.
In many aspects the film is a true collage of many relevant facts that the use of the violence and the resistence to it, can affect the psiquis , the behavior and the ethics of any human being in similar conditions, the horror (do you remember the last Brando`s speech in Apocalyse now?), the supreme efforts to surviving above all the troubles, the great support of the memory in circunstances beyond the edge conditions.
After watching the film you must remember Hobbes , and Orwell`s nightmares (Animal`s farm), because the message in this sense goes beyond the anechdotical story. Don`t think it just a simple horror film .
Gaston Bothoul, in his fundamental work "The war phenomen" (from the early seventies), tells us among other interesting items the long interval of peace in the world has been only two hundred years, so when you listen again about someone who dares call Aquiles like the cities`destructor, you should set this observation under a several analysis.
I don`t think you stay indifferent after watching it. It`s a devastating movie. And not for all tastes. But if you really face the hidden facets of the human being, his transformation under special circunstances, don`t miss it. And either think about the film like a peace`s aphology.
And above all what it shows the film at its end it`s the powerful message that nobody`s innocent, in the wider sense of the word.
Rating:
Summary: The best cult movie of 2001all around the world
Review: If you think that all the theorems about the final aspects of the violence had been expossed before, watch this movie.
In the best tradition of the greatest films that explored this same object, let`s name the obligated references Shock corridor (Fuller),The chase (Artur Penn) , Straw dogs (Sam Peckinpah), Even dwarfs started small (Werner Herzog )The clockwise orange (Kubrick) , Cuckoo`s nest(Foreman) , The brutalization of Franz Blum (Reinhard Hauff) , Do the right thing (Spike Lee), Trainspotting (Danny Boyle), and The believer (Henry Bean),the insight landscape made by this work is really absorbing . The camera work is exceptional. The performances and thge script are superb. With special mention to both of the meaning roles. The concept of authority, and the fact of owning altough fifteen days , and how this circunstance slowly permeates the shadow places of the soul, showing how the human being can become in a true animal, just for that little amonut of power who seems to design a God`s messenger, or any religion.
In many aspects the film is a true collage of many relevant facts that the use of the violence and the resistence to it, can affect the psiquis , the behavior and the ethics of any human being in similar conditions, the horror (do you remember the last Brando`s speech in Apocalyse now?), the supreme efforts to surviving above all the troubles, the great support of the memory in circunstances beyond the edge conditions.
After watching the film you must remember Hobbes , and Orwell`s nightmares (Animal`s farm), because the message in this sense goes beyond the anechdotical story. Don`t think it just a simple horror film .
Gaston Bothoul, in his fundamental work "The war phenomen" (from the early seventies), tells us among other interesting items the long interval of peace in the world has been only two hundred years, so when you listen again about someone who dares call Aquiles like the cities`destructor, you should set this observation under a several analysis.
I don`t think you stay indifferent after watching it. It`s a devastating movie. And not for all tastes. But if you really face the hidden facets of the human being, his transformation under special circunstances, don`t miss it. And either think about the film like a peace`s aphology.
And above all what it shows the film at its end it`s the powerful message that nobody`s innocent, in the wider sense of the word.
Rating:
Summary: Worth buying
Review: Most of the other reviews here describe the film, and I agree with most of the reviewers that DAS EXPERIMENT is a masterpiece (with a few flaws). But should you buy it? After seeing the film in a cinema, I was impressed but also a bit shaken, and didn't feel that I would want to see it again. As it turned out, a friend borrowed it on DVD for us to watch, and it was even better the second time round, despite knowing and fearing the plot. A lot of details come into focus, and although it is still powerful stuff, you have more time to think about the bigger picture, to laugh at the humour (it's there!), and to take a bit of shameful pleasure when tables turn. In fact, I now consider it to be a film to watch at (longish) intervals, and it is high up on my DVDs-to-buy list.
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