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Movie Review: The Wave
The Wave is based on a story that I read a very long time ago (way back in primary school, if memory serves), which is in turn based on an actual experiment which took place in a California school in the sixties. There's a lovely irony in this: Hollywood loves to take exciting events that happened on some other continent and set the movie in California or New York - this film does the opposite, taking events that happened in California and setting the film in a German school. Given the subject matter, if a Hollywod producer chose to set this story in Germany I'd be crying racism, but this is a German film. As a result the story is changed somewhat from the one I remember, but the core has a lot more power than it might otherwise have.
The story takes place over a week in this fictional, small-town school. It's "project week", in which students sign up for intensive study of some political/sociological subject. Mr Wegner was looking forward to teaching a class on Anarchy for project week but is instead assigned to teach Autocracy. He's surprised by the number of students who sign up for that class, but it's clear they signed up because he's a popular teacher. On the first day, he takes a traditional approach to the subject and when the discussion turns inevitably to Nazism the kids protest that they're sick of being guilt-tripped over something that happened in their grandparents' day and could never happen again.
This gives Wegner an idea and he begins a very different approach to teaching the subject. He forms the students into a club with himself as the (elected) leader. He cracks down on the normally relaxed class with iron discipline. They give their club a name, The Wave, design a logo, put their club on MySpace, and agree on a nominal uniform (members are to wear jeans and a white shirt to school).
As the class gets more and more caught up in the idea, a small number of the kids take the game too far, but by the end of the week it's not a small number. What started as a fun joke rapidly takes a sinister turn. Minor scuffles around school turn into an us-vs-them battle and the few kids who oppose the movement are ostracised. When Wegner recognises his experiment is out of control he takes action to stop it, but he's failed to realise how deeply some of the kids have come to rely on the movement, with tragic results.
The Wave doesn't ideologically identify with the Nazis: there's no victimisation of Jewish students (which I vaguely recall being a feature in the original story). In fact there's no real ideology at all, except "school spirit". The similarities are in the visuals: the choice of a shirt as "uniform" and the logo is in red and black, though it doesn't really look like a swastika. Yet the film shows realistically how easily people can get caught up in something new and exciting, without really questioning their actions. The kids see only the good parts, the benefits, but their own actions create the bad, especially among the kids who were more vulnerable to begin with.
It's a cautionary tale: sure, it's about kids, but adults do this too. I think everyone, whatever their age, will find someone in the film with whom they identify so to an extent the audience, too, is swept up in the movement and thus the tragedy of the ending becomes that much more personal.
This is a powerful piece of film, and I highly recommend it.
One final obligatory warning: the movie is in German with English subtitles and...well, my German isn't good enough to say how good the translation is, but the language in the subtitles is pretty blunt and might be offensive to some.
The story takes place over a week in this fictional, small-town school. It's "project week", in which students sign up for intensive study of some political/sociological subject. Mr Wegner was looking forward to teaching a class on Anarchy for project week but is instead assigned to teach Autocracy. He's surprised by the number of students who sign up for that class, but it's clear they signed up because he's a popular teacher. On the first day, he takes a traditional approach to the subject and when the discussion turns inevitably to Nazism the kids protest that they're sick of being guilt-tripped over something that happened in their grandparents' day and could never happen again.
This gives Wegner an idea and he begins a very different approach to teaching the subject. He forms the students into a club with himself as the (elected) leader. He cracks down on the normally relaxed class with iron discipline. They give their club a name, The Wave, design a logo, put their club on MySpace, and agree on a nominal uniform (members are to wear jeans and a white shirt to school).
As the class gets more and more caught up in the idea, a small number of the kids take the game too far, but by the end of the week it's not a small number. What started as a fun joke rapidly takes a sinister turn. Minor scuffles around school turn into an us-vs-them battle and the few kids who oppose the movement are ostracised. When Wegner recognises his experiment is out of control he takes action to stop it, but he's failed to realise how deeply some of the kids have come to rely on the movement, with tragic results.
The Wave doesn't ideologically identify with the Nazis: there's no victimisation of Jewish students (which I vaguely recall being a feature in the original story). In fact there's no real ideology at all, except "school spirit". The similarities are in the visuals: the choice of a shirt as "uniform" and the logo is in red and black, though it doesn't really look like a swastika. Yet the film shows realistically how easily people can get caught up in something new and exciting, without really questioning their actions. The kids see only the good parts, the benefits, but their own actions create the bad, especially among the kids who were more vulnerable to begin with.
It's a cautionary tale: sure, it's about kids, but adults do this too. I think everyone, whatever their age, will find someone in the film with whom they identify so to an extent the audience, too, is swept up in the movement and thus the tragedy of the ending becomes that much more personal.
This is a powerful piece of film, and I highly recommend it.
One final obligatory warning: the movie is in German with English subtitles and...well, my German isn't good enough to say how good the translation is, but the language in the subtitles is pretty blunt and might be offensive to some.
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The German setting does change the story in some ways but it's powerful stuff. Highly recommended.
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Can somebody, please, inform me where I can found 48 hours days?