THE EXPERIMENT Movie Review

If you are looking for a simple movie to get your blood boiling then you might want to consider renting The Experiment. I went into this movie having watched a documentary just a few nights prior about a psychosocial prison experiment that happen back in 1971 dubbed the Stanford Prison Experiment. The study was cut short because of the things that went down in the prison setting. What happened was something that you would not imagine in your day to day thinking process. It opened my eyes up wide to how the system works and how survival is key when placed into an inferior role.

Forest Whitaker and Adrian Brody's performances are phenomenal in this brilliant movie. If you have seen the movie The Last King of Scotland then you should know that it was a no brainer to cast Forest as one of the prison guards. Brody on the other hand plays one of the prisoners and is a peace loving kind of person before entering into the experiment. These two actors are supported by Cam Gigandet, Clifton Collins Jr., Fisher Stevens and Maggie Grace in the cast.

Before entering into the experiment the potential subjects are put through lengthy questioning and have to watch a movie with intense graphics. They are offered $1,000 a day but if any of the subjects choose to leave the experiment then everyone loses out on the money. They are then placed in a prison surrounding, seperated into two different groups one being prisoner and the other guard. From there they are given the rules about conduct in which prisoners must listen to the guards and guards must enforce punishment without using any form of physical abuse. What seems a simple study turns into something unimaginable. Honestly, you would expect a few of the things that happened to happen but to what extreme? It is filled with power struggles and an every man for himself type of mentality in the end.

This movie is a remake that outshines the original German film Das Experiment that was released in 2001 and how could it not with this type of casting? It's definitely worth a look if you are interested in seeing how humans interact when faced with this type of situation. It is still amazing how intensely controversial the Stanford Experiment is still today even 40 years later.

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