The human psyche is an interesting thing, how does it work? Are we really as civilised as we think we are? How much time is necessary before we forget about our manners and treat other badly? Those are interesting questions that might be hard to give a good answer to.
The Experiment is based (although very different) on the Stanford prison experiment where student were randomly assigned roles of either prisoner or prison guard. The assignment for the guards was to run a prison. The experiment was supposed to run for 2 weeks, but had to be aborted because the guards were not treating the prisoners very well. Ethically they could no longer continue.
The setup for this movie is almost the same, but instead of students the subjects are people that have responded to an ad in the paper.
This is a very dark movie, in which the viewer will be shocked by some real footage that is shown to Travis (Adrien Brody). These images are violent and gruesome.
After selecting which people can join the experiment they are all put on a bus and driven to the test site where we can see the impact of the experiment on the prisoners (lead by Brody) and the guards (lead by Forest Whitaker).
The guards receive a couple of simple rules they have to follow. If they don’t a red light will light up and they won’t get paid. It shows that a few simple rules and a big bag of money are enough for some people to turn into savages.
It was a shame that this movie does not show the reaction of the researchers to everything that is happening in the “prison”. This would have added a very interesting extra dimension to the movie which could have improved it a lot. Now it’s just a battle between the prisoners and guards and you don’t know what kind of discussion take place on the other side of the cameras that film the experiment.
The movie has a small story about the romance Travis has, which really didn’t add anything to the movie and could have been cut out.
The Experiment was not the movie I was expecting and showed a lot of scenes where people were degraded. It’s not a nice movie to watch. Maybe if you want to know what horrible things people are capable of, but that’s it.
Score: 6