The Wave is 2008 German film directed by Dennis Gansel and starring Jürgen Vogel, Frederick Lau, Jennifer Ulrich and Max Riemelt in the leads. It is based on Ron Jones‘ social experiment The Third Wave.
The Wave is an eye opening movie that teaches the world a great lesson. The movie takes place in modern day Germany and is based off a true story. A teacher (Reiner) at a high school originally wants to teach an anarchy class during project week. He is influential and popular among the students and an anarchist himself. Instead of anarchy he ends up teaching the autocracy class which is slightly less popular because all the German students are fed up with hearing about dictatorships because of what Hitler did and claim that it could never happen in Germany again.
Due to the students claim, Reiner decides to run an experiment on the class, turning the class room into a mini dictatorship with the main message being unity is power. The first thing Reiner implements is discipline; he tells students they have to sit with perfect posture and stand up to speak. Next, he changed the seating arrangement so that all the people with bad grades sat next to the people with good grades and told them to help each other. He also has students march in unity in order to bother the anarchy class and make their class seem cooler.
After adding these benefits to the class room, the class grew more popular and more students wanted to join. Now that students liked the class they could be influenced more. The teacher then implements uniforms, a logo, and even a hand gesture to symbolize a wave motion. As the unity of the class grows it starts effecting the student’s and teacher’s outside lives by ruining relationships and starting fights. Some people in the class really start taking to the class while others that didn’t want to wear the uniform or weren’t in the class are being ostracized.
Finally, things start getting really out of hand when Reiner calls a meeting at the auditorium claiming that the Wave will roll over Germany and take over the world. During his speech Reiner starts to understand that things are going to far and calls off the Wave and thats when tragedy strikes and the students realize they became the monsters they said they never would.
To read about the experiment click here.
