- Also Known As:
- Unknown
- Languages:
- Length:
- 92 minutes (Uncut)
- Review Format:
- DVD
- Year:
- 2010
- Country:
- Predominant Genre:
- Thriller
- Director:
- Outstanding Performances:
- Premiss:
- Twenty-six men are chosen to participate in the roles of guards and prisoners in a psychological study that soon spirals out of control.
- Themes:
- Alienation | Christianity | Coming-of-age | Compassion | Corporate Power | Courage | Curative | Destiny | Emotional repression | Empathy | Equality | Erotophobia | Free Speech | Genocide | God | Gynophobia | Identity | Individualism | Justice | Loneliness | Love | Narcissism | Nostalgia | Personal | Personal change | Political | Pornography | Propaganda | Redemption | Religion | Republicanism | Role modeling | Sadomasochism | Schizophrenia | Science | Self-Esteem | Sex | Sexism | Sexual Repression | Social class | Society | Snobbery | Solipsism | The State | Stereotyping | Totalitarianism | White culture | White guilt | White privilege | White supremacy
- Similar to:
QED
English-language remakes of foreign-language originals are usually inferior simplifications
Christian propaganda for the redemptive power of sexual love, with murder as the first postlapsarian sin of Man.
Interesting exploration of inherent White violence and emotional repression, along with the allegedly-essentialistic justifications for them. Also, an analogy for the way in which Whites raise their children as alienated and powerless entities trapped in an emotional space where they have no overall control and, so, are easier to train to compensate by acting-out their rage against those they allege are inferior (&, thus, deserving of the resulting hostility). Such a White-created world is designed to justify the White amorality on show here.
The film begins with animals fighting - despite the fact that the vast majority of animals do not predate one another - and humans (mostly the global minority: Caucasians) engaging in irrational violence. This suggests violence as an irrepressible human instinct, rather than a circular piece of White wishful-thinking used to justify such violence - as well as serving the desire of evading guilt and personal responsibility for such behavior.
We are required to believe that the endemic nature of the inappropriate-aggression of White culture results from the basic facts of human nature, rather than from White supremacy: An obvious dishonesty that hurts the integrity of the movie. Worst of all, those Whites who renounce violence as a solution to problems are shown as weak and evasive people who wish to evade the same problems, responsibilities and, ultimately, solutions that their so-called weakness cannot provide.
The fundamental unreality of the situation presented here never seems to fully occur to any of the characters - or even the screenplay. These people are also, thus, psychologically-locked into culturally-determined roles; suggesting an inability to think rationally, as well as being more than willing to follow senseless rules that were only invented for the sake of control - not social order: As if Whites actually need rigid rules in order to feel anything like normal human beings. That some of the characters take their temporary roles too seriously - because they have otherwise empty lives - is not fully explored, since we never discover why their lives outside the experiment are so bleak that this experiment could in any way provide solace for them. What other culture would feel the need to produce such an odd drama about its own people that evades the very important issues it raises?
As an exploration of the banality of evil, this movie does not explain why Whites lose focus on the goal here (money) and choose to obsess on an amoral means of obtaining it, rather than simply biding their time by, say, playing cards for the alloted two-weeks’s duration of the experiment.
The reason the movie leaves unexamined is that White amorality produces White paranoia - a distraction from civilized enterprise. For Whites, power is a greater aphrodisiac than money - or even women - because it creates the illusion that following any rules makes one just as powerful as those who created them, without the need for great effort on the part of those who thus enslave themselves. Yet, all it really proves is that one is scared to disobey arbitrary rules and create wealth ethically: A solace for the inherently-political nature of all White relationships and the resultant lack of mutual support and a strong sense of identity which they contain.
What is good here is that - given the thin characterization - the quality of the actors makes the whole thing a watchable time-passer. Yet, one wonders why Whites would be unable to see the difference between working together (to get what they all want) and internecine self-destruction. The movie queers its own pitch by creating a situation that will inevitably lead to violence in order to prove that Whites (&, by implied extension, all other ethnic groups) are violent and cannot work together. This, as a direct result of the rigidly-hierarchical nature of a White culture that creates a similar wallowing in violence in real-life. Instead of an insightful dramatic exploration of violence, as such, all we really learn is that White culture is violent and that other cultures should fear White people.
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