I've seen a number of films with this same basic premise... it's not new. People have been riffing on what I like to call the Milgram plot now for years. Throw a bunch of people together, divide them in half and give one half absolute authority and no rules, the other half no rights. It can produce a very tense, uncomfortable, interesting movie.
Unfortunately, Kyle Patrick Alvarez's film of Phil Zimbardo's reckless, misguided, and absolutely unscientific experiment on a handful of young men in the Summer of '71 in a Stanford campus building just doesn't deliver enough to merit its 122 minute slog.
It isn't that the performances aren't good (well, except for Crudup, who's a disaster, coming across as a guy too dim to even be employed at a hot car lot). It's the waffling tone of the film and the indecisive script by Tim Talbott that ultimately condemn it to ineffectiveness. Billy Crudup's hamminess and Talbott and Alvarez's misguided intentions certainly don't help.
For a good three-quarters of the film, we're treated to a gleeful, gloating, willfully-ignorant portrayal of Zimbardo by Crudup, and a fierce build-up of unrepentant sadism from the mock guards under his control, only to suddenly find the mad doctor's heart soften by the film's last reel --- neither convincing or explicable --- and an end-crawl blurb that makes Zimbardo out to be some kind of misunderstood academic saint. The film is ill-conceived and its aims incoherent, if not completely missing.
Even though we are at times an overly litigious society, if this thinly disguised exercise in megalomania had gone on today, Zimbardo would be burned to the ground (and rightly so), buried till he choked in civil suits on mental and physical abuse charges, or at the very least reckless endangerment. Stanford would throw him under the bus faster than it could crush him (again, rightly so).
So what does this really leave us as viewers? Just a lot of sadism and degradation at the hands of a "scientist" who doesn't even seem to know the meaning of the term "independent control group" when quizzed by a colleague... a man so warped that he brings along his ex-con "subject" or buddy (never was clear) to interject the man's uneducated, obviously over-emotional opinions into the fray to muddy things further.
What's next, a glorification of Joseph Mengele's good intentions?
Despite the good, sometimes terrifying performance from most of the game young cast, The Stanford Prison Experiment is as meaningless and facile as the case on which it's based.
Unfortunately, Kyle Patrick Alvarez's film of Phil Zimbardo's reckless, misguided, and absolutely unscientific experiment on a handful of young men in the Summer of '71 in a Stanford campus building just doesn't deliver enough to merit its 122 minute slog.
It isn't that the performances aren't good (well, except for Crudup, who's a disaster, coming across as a guy too dim to even be employed at a hot car lot). It's the waffling tone of the film and the indecisive script by Tim Talbott that ultimately condemn it to ineffectiveness. Billy Crudup's hamminess and Talbott and Alvarez's misguided intentions certainly don't help.
For a good three-quarters of the film, we're treated to a gleeful, gloating, willfully-ignorant portrayal of Zimbardo by Crudup, and a fierce build-up of unrepentant sadism from the mock guards under his control, only to suddenly find the mad doctor's heart soften by the film's last reel --- neither convincing or explicable --- and an end-crawl blurb that makes Zimbardo out to be some kind of misunderstood academic saint. The film is ill-conceived and its aims incoherent, if not completely missing.
Even though we are at times an overly litigious society, if this thinly disguised exercise in megalomania had gone on today, Zimbardo would be burned to the ground (and rightly so), buried till he choked in civil suits on mental and physical abuse charges, or at the very least reckless endangerment. Stanford would throw him under the bus faster than it could crush him (again, rightly so).
So what does this really leave us as viewers? Just a lot of sadism and degradation at the hands of a "scientist" who doesn't even seem to know the meaning of the term "independent control group" when quizzed by a colleague... a man so warped that he brings along his ex-con "subject" or buddy (never was clear) to interject the man's uneducated, obviously over-emotional opinions into the fray to muddy things further.
What's next, a glorification of Joseph Mengele's good intentions?
Despite the good, sometimes terrifying performance from most of the game young cast, The Stanford Prison Experiment is as meaningless and facile as the case on which it's based.