Movie ramblings and hand porn
Sep. 3rd, 2014 08:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
valarltdThe Experiment is a 2010 film based on the Stanford Prison Experiment.
The original experiment had to be cut short after 6 days. They used college students in a made-over dorm.
The film positions things as a medical experiment for money, and uses an abandoned building in the middle of nowhere. Twenty six men are selected for the experiment, and that's a lot to keep track of. Most of them are just faces.
The Guards are led by Forrest Whitaker and his pair of hyenas, Chase (Cam Gigandet, Kevin Volchek from The O.C.) and Helwig (Travis Filmmel, currently Ragnar on The Vikings). Whitaker's Barris is a good man, a devout man, brutally henpacked by his mother. Chase presents as a good-looking, All-American pot-head sex maniac, but takes a darker turn into rapist almost as soon as he has power. Helwig is an Adam Lambert clone, down to nailpolish, eye-liner and faux-hawk. The rest blend into a blur of big white guys, with one exception. David Banner as Bosch is the only one of the guards who shows real compassion towards his charges, while arguably taking the most damage in the early stages (a bloody nose from a badly thrown basketball) Bosch ends up a prisoner himself.
The prisoners coalesce around Adrien Brody's Travis. But again, with such a large number, only Benjy, the diabetic who dreams of writing graphic novels; Nix, the white supremacist (ironically played by Clifton Collins Jr, Romeo from Boondock Saints 2); Governor, notable because he is the oldest; and 22, Oscar, the pretty Hispanic boy whom Chase targets.
Eight out of 26, and the rest are wallpaper.
Anyway, the movie is about ideals, and authority, and morality. It's about how an outside-focused morality is dangerous (the guards know they have stepped over the line if the red light comes on. it never does). It's about whether good men remain good under bad conditions. It's about whether humans can evolve past being animals, as Travis believes, or whether they can't, as Nix claims.
Barris and Travis both lose their ideas of who they are. At the end, Barris is paging through his pocket Bible, trying to find himself again. Travis uses the money and goes to India, to be with his girlfriend. He looks as if he has found himself already.
But none of that is why I watch it.
This is
And the fact that Travis totally has my tattoo. I want a Tree of Life, on my shoulder. But I want it on the one where he has the Eight Arrows of Chaos.
The original experiment had to be cut short after 6 days. They used college students in a made-over dorm.
The film positions things as a medical experiment for money, and uses an abandoned building in the middle of nowhere. Twenty six men are selected for the experiment, and that's a lot to keep track of. Most of them are just faces.
The Guards are led by Forrest Whitaker and his pair of hyenas, Chase (Cam Gigandet, Kevin Volchek from The O.C.) and Helwig (Travis Filmmel, currently Ragnar on The Vikings). Whitaker's Barris is a good man, a devout man, brutally henpacked by his mother. Chase presents as a good-looking, All-American pot-head sex maniac, but takes a darker turn into rapist almost as soon as he has power. Helwig is an Adam Lambert clone, down to nailpolish, eye-liner and faux-hawk. The rest blend into a blur of big white guys, with one exception. David Banner as Bosch is the only one of the guards who shows real compassion towards his charges, while arguably taking the most damage in the early stages (a bloody nose from a badly thrown basketball) Bosch ends up a prisoner himself.
The prisoners coalesce around Adrien Brody's Travis. But again, with such a large number, only Benjy, the diabetic who dreams of writing graphic novels; Nix, the white supremacist (ironically played by Clifton Collins Jr, Romeo from Boondock Saints 2); Governor, notable because he is the oldest; and 22, Oscar, the pretty Hispanic boy whom Chase targets.
Eight out of 26, and the rest are wallpaper.
Anyway, the movie is about ideals, and authority, and morality. It's about how an outside-focused morality is dangerous (the guards know they have stepped over the line if the red light comes on. it never does). It's about whether good men remain good under bad conditions. It's about whether humans can evolve past being animals, as Travis believes, or whether they can't, as Nix claims.
Barris and Travis both lose their ideas of who they are. At the end, Barris is paging through his pocket Bible, trying to find himself again. Travis uses the money and goes to India, to be with his girlfriend. He looks as if he has found himself already.
But none of that is why I watch it.
This is
And the fact that Travis totally has my tattoo. I want a Tree of Life, on my shoulder. But I want it on the one where he has the Eight Arrows of Chaos.
