Die Welle, Review

I have been meaning to watch this movie for a couple of weeks now and eventually I watched it last night. Prior to the screening I had read a lot about it and I was prepared to watch a German film of the magnitude of “The Experiment” or the “Life of Others”. I will start by saying that the film did not deliver what I expected but it did not fail all together.

The story is about a left-wing high school teacher that tries to teach his students about the nature of fascism and show them that a dictatorship is still possible. Long story short, he organizes them into a group with Nazi characteristics and the students start to act like a fascist group. The experiment gets out of his hands and and the film climaxes into a rather interesting but expected finale.

The first part of the film is better than the second focusing on group dynamics and has some political depth (not a lot though). Second half, on the other hand, focuses more onto the characters and gets kinda boring. It misses to hold interest as it moves on to showing individual relationships between students which are interesting but miss the point of the film which works better with group dynamics.

The theme of the film was very promising and the movie could have been so much better. A friend who watched the film with me last night suggested that it was over simplified and I agree with him on that. It is either the producers had a lot of ideas but failed to deliver them, or the intentionally simplified the movie to be digested easier by a mainstream audience. At any rate you will enjoy the movie and will provide you and your friends with some food for thought and conversation.