The Experiment

At times, I hated watching this movie. I'm not sure if it was because Forest Whitaker was such a convincing villain or because the storyline made me uncomfortable. Maybe both. There is a lot to be said about injustice and humanity in this movie, and I can't decide if I am having negative leanings towards this movie because I don't like what it has to say or because the movie itself was bad.

Starring Oscar winners Adrien Brody and Forest Whitaker, The Experiment is the story of a group of guys who agree to undergo a psychological experiment with the promise of a large payout in the end. The experiment itself requires these men to live in a prison for two weeks. A handful of them are chosen to be guards and the rest are prisoners. The guards struggle to maintain their authority when they are challenged by the prisoners but cannot respond with violence. Forest emerges as the leader of the guards and Brody as the leader of the prisoners.

I must admit my own bias here: I hate how having Academy Award winners can skew my out look of a movie. Because this one has TWO winners, I came into the movie assuming that it had to be good because they were in it, and now find myself confused. I still can't decide if I enjoyed this movie as a whole. I like the premise and I enjoyed considering if how the experiment panned out in this movie would be similar in real life. What if it was a group of women? What if the rules were different? This movie paints a pretty bleak picture of human nature, and does little to reassure us that we have redeeming qualities at the end. Forest was especially unnerving, which I guess is good from an acting standpoint, but his character was really awful. The first hour and a bit were also pretty slow moving.

A shout out to all my Lost fans, here we are reunited with Shannon (Maggie Grace) AND Minkowski (Fisher Stevens). I miss Lost.

I need to watch a comedy after this one.