Sundance. The Wave.

"To call The Wave 'a German Fight Club' would be both accurate and misleading," writes Ryan Stewart at In the Company of Glenn. "The Wave is a somewhat more grounded drama with a more specific focus: to stare deeply into the eyes of today's German youth and find the grandfathers inside.... Many references, such as to anti-Nazi heroine Sophie Scholl, may fly over the heads of American audiences, and The Wave loses steam considerably in its final act, but overall it's one of this year's most compelling Sundance offerings."

"Dennis Gansel turns the true story of a high-school history experiment gone awry into a glossy, pulse-pounding thriller, employing methods almost as fascistic as those of The Wave itself. Intentional irony?" asks Mike D'Angelo at ScreenGrab.

"The Wave is by no means a bad film; it's just already been done," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "And when it was done before, it was aimed at teens. Grown-ups shouldn't expect to get much out of it."

Justin Chang explains in Variety: "Though it's not mentioned in the writing credits, Morton Rhue's 1988 novel The Wave - a fictional retelling of the 1967 experiment conducted by Palo Alto, Calif, history teacher William Ron Jones (who served as a consultant on the film) - has become a staple of many a high school curriculum. In relocating the story to Germany, Gansel and co-scenarist Peter Thorwarth (drawing from Jones' original account and a 1981 teleplay) pointedly raise the question of whether a Third Reich-style regime could emerge again - and find the answer to be an unambiguous yes."

Posted by dwhudson at January 25, 2008 3:59 PM