Protraph Lack of good storyline.

Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

Keira Brennan The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

Aneesa Wardle The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Rodrigo Amaro The dedicated teacher Mr. Ross was right about such statement? How far would he go to teach high school kids an important History lesson about the most horrendous crime of the 20th Century? Watch it and judge for yourself while being part of an interesting experiment about how dictatorships are made without people realizing their dangers. The story is basically the same as "The Wave", German film released in 2008, both films were accounts of an real experiment that took place in California in 1967, but the approach of both movies have their own differences. In what they're equal? In their greatness and the message they give to us. History teacher Ben Ross (Bruce Davison) tells his students about the genocide of millions of people during the WW2 intriguing them while demonstrating facts of how things worked at the time. But he's asked an difficult question: "How come no one among the German citizens did nothing to stop the Nazists of such atrocity? Ross doesn't answer this question but instead takes his students to be involved in something that might take these interrogations marks off their heads: he starts an experiment where all in the classroom must follow, being an united group who uses the quote "Strength through discipline, strength through community, strength through action" as their motto. Here it starts "The Wave", an united and disciplined group about to change hearts and minds of their school, and who knows more they can do. It's all fun and new, until they take this experiment too seriously. Ross pushes them too far, forgetting that waves always return to the same place, always dying on the shore. His project makes the students blind of things, they've become unaware of how dangerous this could be outside of school's doors. He finds some resistance from his wife and from some of his students, but people will listen to this minority? Will Ross prove a point with this project or he'll be seduced by the power in his hands and make more of it? This special presentation in more of an educational film rather than a thriller like the German film; the ending was absolutely great for giving the lesson in the best possible way while the other film teached the lesson in the darkest possible way (great and exciting as well). Davison gives an extraordinary show in the main role; some of the kids are really good (the solitary Robert, played by Johnny Doran, was incredible), others not so much, near of a bad acting. But the lesson was effectively presented but by the teacher and by the movie: lousy and irresponsible dictatorships can reborn at any time. You only need downtrodden people in need of a rescuer, of preference a popular leader to follow; victims to be blamed for the lack of progress of the country who'll must exterminated later; and make sure people won't realize what they're doing is really terrible quoting that it will be good of the nation. When I hear that most of 60% of kids in school age don't know what the Holocaust was it makes me wonder why films like this are not well-known for them to really learn something (you can even find it at Google). We, as audience, must never forget this lesson. 10/10

MrInitialMan I saw this movie in high school. By then, the movie was more than 15 years old.Acting might not have been the greatest, but I didn't really notice. It wasn't unbearably overacted, anyways.Some have mentioned the movie is dated, but hey, it's 1981. 26 years old at the time of writing. Star Trek is dated, but it's still a great show.The plot. Well, kids want to know how people got caught up in Nazism, and the teacher, having difficulty explaining, decides to demonstrate to them by creating an atmosphere of order and discipline.The impact: Brrrrrr! This was down-right chiller, since when one watched it, one realized that it could so easily happen anywhere, as it was perfectly true to simple human nature. One of the scariest movies I have ever seen, and not a masked madman in sight.

ambrosia_1 Based on a true story (do a Wiki search on "Ron Jones" & "The Third Wave" experiment), a Palo Alto, CA high school teacher in 1967 decides to give his students a lesson in "mob mentality" and it evolves into a psychological experiment on the evolution of fascism.The movie was both highly praised for the ground-breaking nature of the subject and widely condemned for glorifying the almost certain devastating emotional distress inflicted upon the unwitting students/subjects.Either way, the video is still replayed in high school and college sociology classes across the country to this day... and it must be on third and fourth generation video tape by now since (afaik), it is not yet available on tape or DVD.The most memorable ABC After School Special ever made.

Ddey65 I saw this movie at a time when I was beginning to question the importance of fitting in, while most kids my age were still desperately seeking to belong. Many may argue otherwise, but I saw it as an ABC Afterschool Special.The plot of this movie has already been explained enough here, and the incidents are based on a true story -- A group of high school kids wonder how people in Germany could fall for the lies of Adolf Hitler, and inadvertently become pawns in a teacher's experiment that clearly displays how. Of course, the truth is that even militaristic fringe groups like the National Socialist German Worker's Party, and similar organizations aren't the only groups that feed upon the alleged human need to belong to force their collective will on people. Any youth-oriented clique can be repressive and destructive, but the only ones parents and other adults seem to fear are the burnouts and gangs. Jocks, preppies, and even geeks can be just as repressive. Four years later in THE BREAKFAST CLUB, when Molly Ringwald told Judd Nelson "Only burnouts like you get high," the truth about a bunch of Metro New York preppies and THEIR drug habits were being revealed after one of them killed his girlfriend in Central Park. What makes this movie so special is that it urges teenagers to decide their own values, hold onto them, and never to fall into the trap of "group-think." Nearly 15 years earlier, a fictional teacher made a similar observation -- "If you deny who you are, what you know, or who you know, you deny the simplest part of being alive, and then you die." More than 20 years later, a two-dimensional teenage girl would say it so much better --"Stand firm for what you believe in, until and unless logic and experience proves you wrong." Good lessons for all.