TenPin1969
Bad acting. Completely unbelievable plot. Imagine a 13 year old who has no idea what a philosophy class is, no idea how people would act in a life threatening situation, a weirdly vindicative and not-at-all realistic teacher character, and the stupidest ending ever and he'd still write a better script than this.
logopolis
The film held my interest all the way through. Ideas were presented, explored and illustrated. Production values were high. I thoroughly enjoyed this film. But for those who need action scenes to keep from being bored and who find conversations to be the dull part of a film that need to be skipped over to get to the good parts, this film is not for you.Who cares if it didn't meet the academic criteria for a classic philosophy course? If there were plot holes, I say so what. It was a film and your just go along with the plot in the universe the film is set.
mattsean-52169
As other people have detailed more completely than I care to, this movie is mediocre at best if you're looking for a movie about philosophy. If you try to watch the movie from this point of view it's downright infuriating and deserves the single star that so many reviewers gave.Watching the movie as a drama, it's passable. The teacher claims that they're doing a thought experiment but in actuality I would say they were playing a bad role playing game (think Dungeons and Dragons). Imagine a really nasty DM (the teacher) empowered to force others to play his game by use of his position of authority. He does most of the things that a bad DM does and for reasons consistent with most common role playing game drama. This doesn't really pull together to make a fantastic movie but it's decent.
Nicki B
I would say that this movie started off great, but in all honesty, I don't think that it did. While the imagery was impressive, the characters were all unlikable. It was nearly impossible to sympathize with a pretentious group of young people and their narcissistic 'holier-than-thou' teacher. We begin with a game about a hypothetical situation that our students refuse to play, because pretending about death offends their delicate sensibilities. With the dramatics that go on, including our leading lady attempting to walk out of the class, you would think they were being asked to actually kill people. Sophie Lowe played our lead, Petra, who's character is apparently the smartest to ever attend the school. Her acting was atrocious. Absolutely awful. Her character was the second worst in the move, following only the teacher himself. The delicate rose petal of a genius is supposedly morally superior to everyone else, because her way of thinking is apparently the best way. This, by the end of the movie, is proved to be untrue. Our professor is played by James D'Arcy. I've seen this actor in other projects and always thought he was decent, but his performance here was awkward and forced. Maybe he found his character as distasteful as I -and the other characters in the movie- did. Normally I love a good movie, but it was hard to watch a teacher bully a group of students under the pretense of "stretching their minds". The logic behind the game Mr. Zimit creates is flimsy at best and is obviously self serving, in fact, he creates for himself a player that wins out no mater the scenario. His obsession with Petra, and hatred for her boyfriend, is obvious from the very beginning. The romance in this story is thrown in for literally no reason. It has nothing to do with the actual theme of the movie. Instead if just makes for poorly filmed make outs between to actors with no chemistry and gives the teacher something to be bitter about. Whoever wrote this movie seems to have learned everything they could about philosophy from Wikipedia.
AD
