![the experiment 2010 movie the experiment 2010 movie](https://www.prisonmovies.net/wp-content/uploads/experiment-2-300x173.jpg)
Maybe 'The Experiment' was simply trying to prove whether or not anyone would even watch such a tepid, halfhearted bit of nonsense. And the movie's dogged refusal to address or critique the recent prison abuse scandals makes it instantly irrelevant. 'The Experiment' never makes you feel like you're going through what these guys are going through, psychologically or emotionally, unlike, say, Richard Kelly's masterful 'The Box.' (That movie's tagline was "You are the experiment.") You don't come out of 'The Experiment' feeling anything, really. While I never saw the original German film, this movie's astounding mediocrity, evidenced by the fact that even with its alluring star power it went straight to home video, has turned me off of the subject for good.
THE EXPERIMENT 2010 MOVIE SERIES
Brody, who in recent years has been drawn to above-average genre trash (stuff like 'King Kong,' 'Splice,' and 'Predators') is clearly slumming it here, with Scheuring (creator of the ludicrous television series 'Prison Break'), indulging in well-worn clichés (prison rape, anyone?) and inventing all new ones (where, exactly, is the emo prison guard getting his constant supply of eye-liner and hair gel?) (After those opening scenes, Stevens disappears altogether.) As the societal norms break down, so does the movie, with previously dignified actors like Whitaker and Collins turning in over-the-top caricatures (just wait until you see the scene when Whitaker gets a boner after asserting his power as a guard - ick). Fisher Stevens shows up at the beginning as a mildly malevolent higher-up, who dictates the orders and divides our actors into "prisoners" and "guards." Just seeing Stevens, a sterling actor who is almost always tragically underrated, gave me hope not only for the movie, but also that there would be a third psychological profile developed beyond the prisoners and the guards: the experimenters themselves.īesides a slightly menacing zoom of a video camera lens, the conductors of the experiment are wholly without personality. as a white supremacist and Ethan Cohn as a loveably doughy comic book writer.
![the experiment 2010 movie the experiment 2010 movie](https://www.picclickimg.com/d/l400/pict/184704099359_/Adrien-Brody-Forest-Whitaker-Experiment-DVD-NEUF.jpg)
Other blandly drawn characters who are snookered into this experiment include Forest Whitaker, as a sexually repressed mama's boy (think Norman Bates with a bad "daytime" wig) Cam Gigandet as a jocky prick Clifton Collins Jr. It's through his desperate eyes that we're introduced to the experiment, which offers $15,000 per participant, and is based on the Stanford experiment exactly.
![the experiment 2010 movie the experiment 2010 movie](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMDMxMjk1NzctN2U2Ni00NTU4LTk0MzgtNDFkYTJhOGI1ZDgxXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNTIzOTk5ODM@._V1_.jpg)
In the film, Adrian Brody plays Travis, a listless loser about whom we don't really know anything, besides the fact that he has a crush on a girl named Bay ('Lost's' Maggie Grace) and has a whole bunch of wicked, production design-y tattoos. I'm telling you all of this because this is the basic plot of 'The Experiment,' Paul Scheuring's remake of the 2001 German film 'Das Experiment.' While the German film was based in part on a novel, there doesn't seem to be any kind of deeper investment in the material here besides, "well, here's that experiment from 25 years ago and it's been dramatized a bit." And it's been cited and discussed and picked apart ever since, with particular interest coming after the Abu Ghraib torture incidents in Iraq came to light. The entire thing was filmed, and garnered much attention due to the stressful conditions in which the college kids found themselves, with the entire experiment breaking down in less than a week.īasically, the experiment was supposed to show the conductors how humans would react in incredibly strenuous conditions, and it's telling that the societal boundaries and basic humanities broke down so quickly. The experiment recruited a couple dozen undergraduates, half of whom were tasked to portray prisoners in a mock-prison set-up in the Stanford basement, while the other half acted as guards. According to my half-ass Google-ing, the Stanford prison experiment was a psychological study conducted by professor Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University.