Eh, so back into the mix with normal quick reviews again. Here to redeem himself this week is the same feller who picked V/H/S, last time, so, not a very high bar to hurdle to say the least (you hurdle bars, right?) So he picked 2010 adaptation of an adaptation of a real life psychological experiment called (aptly) The Experiment. It stars Adrian Brody and Forest Whitaker, and isn’t anything worth running out for.
If you’re unfamiliar, there was a very real psychological experiment (back before there were ethical standards for psychological experiments which now prohibit subjects from being in danger of any mental or physical harm) done back in 1971 known widely as the Stanford Prison Experiment. They took 24 volunteers who passed tests to ensure they weren’t raging lunatics, then randomly assigned 12 of them the roles of being guards, and 12 the roles of inmates and told them to play prison for two weeks. After the first day there were riots, and in the following days degrading and humiliating practices were put in place against the “prisoners” (Abu Graib style) and the study ended after 6 days only after the professor’s wife insisted that it stop (the professor, by the way, had made himself “prison warden” during the ordeal”). So, it’s a lot of fun, and shows that as humans, we’re pretty screwed, and that’s all well and good, but this movie–with Adrian and Forest–is it any good? Nah.
Not really. Most of the performances seem uninvolved and disconnected, and outside of a very small handful of hard-to-watch scenes, the movie plays out pretty predictably and uninterestingly. It seems like kind of a betrayal to the very real ramifications of psychological testing when you take these characters and scenarios and blow them waaay out of proportion. You have Adrian as the ultra-righteous Buddhist, and Forest as the ultra-crazy Christian conservative, and, *sigh*, yeah. Yay black and white good vs. evil. All the other characters are plain and one-dimensional, and we’re not left with any sort of notable resolution. Actually, scratch that. The resolution they give us is incorrect. Generally, the best you can say about the actual Stanford experiment is that when given roles, people play the hell out of them and it compromises basic human integrity. The worst you can say, obviously, is that humans are totally boned as a species and we will let any bit of power go to our heads unchecked and we’re all Nazis given the chance. What the movie’s conclusion is, is that we’re still better than caged animals because we have the choice to do something about it.
Seriously, that’s what Adrian Brody says on the bus ride home from the prison (after people have died in his arms and stuff). Why does he say that? I dunno. The conclusion is largely vague and unsatisfactory, in that it doesn’t delve into the actual relative psychology of the experiment itself, it just sorta, ends, with Brody getting the girl. And I think someone got prosecuted or something. It kinda glosses over that.
Final grade: C (better than V/H/S)