A good movie

To be honest, after watching ‘Das Experiment’ and the US remake ‘The Experiment’, I wasn’t exactly dying to see a 3^rd movie about this story but, somehow, I still ended up watching this movie. Well, I have to admit that it is still such a fascinating tale and the fact that they took a different approach than the previous movies still made the damned thing really interesting to behold. Indeed, while watching this flick, I was wondering what was made up this time around but, apparently, nearly all the dialogues between the ‘guards’ and the ‘prisoners’ during the experiment were actually taken directly from the actual footage of the real-life experiment. Another intriguing thing was that, except for one event during which a guard did hit a prisoner with his baton, there was in fact very little physical violence involved after all. However, the psychological violence was again immense making the whole thing at the same time quite fascinating but also really nauseating to behold. However, while ‘Das Experiment’ focused mostly on how much power can corrupt people, this movie focused more on how much completely misguided this whole experiment turned out to be. Seriously, the damned thing had actually very little scientific value and it had after all not much to do with replicating the relationship between guards and prisoners in an actual jail. In my opinion, it became more a study on how much people can take if you basically torture them relentlessly hours on end. Of course, you could argue that prisons can be terribly dehumanizing but it is actually a tragic side-effect of these establishments and it was never their actual purpose. Furthermore, this whole experiment had some really shaky rules which were basically shattered pretty much right from the beginning. Finally, it was rather bewildering how Dr. Philip Zimbardo seemed to be considered as some bona fide psychologist when he got completely sucked in his own experiment. Anyway, to conclude, even though this movie might seem rather unnecessary since ‘Das Experiment’ was already a masterpiece, it was still a decent watch and it is worth a look, especially if you are interested by this subject.