Sorry, this movie sucks

Sick Product of a Sick System

Just perfect...

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

I have loved psychology since high school and often wish I had pursued a career in the field, but I didn't so I have to get my fix elsewhere. We were lucky to have received two movies focused on the subject of famous psychological experiments last year (EXPERIMENTER and THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT) and, while I was more interested in a dramatization of the Stanford experiment, my local stores only carried the other. EXPERIMENTER is a strange little docudrama that details the work of Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard), most prominently his experiment on obedience. For those unfamiliar, the subject of the experiment would act as the "teacher" and ask a series of memory questions to the "student". Interacting in separate rooms via a one-way intercom, the teacher would be commanded to shock the student with increasing voltage for every wrong answer until the student (a member of Milgram's team) is heard grunting in pain, demanding the experiment be halted, and eventually goes silent. Milgram's goal was to see how many people would continue the experiment knowing they are causing pain to an innocent subject and how far people would allow the voltage to climb before refusing to continue. The results of his experiment were considered shocking and the whole event remains controversial; EXPERIMENTER delves into Milgram's views on the importance of the results, the question of whether his experiment was ethically sound, and how this one experiment continued to resonate throughout his career until his eventual death late in 1984.EXPERIMENTER is a film for a niche audience and I can see most people either bored or put off by director Michael Almereyda's creative choices. Psychology is a hard topic to make too exciting. Interesting, sure, but not exciting. The most drama you find in the film comes from the negative reactions to Milgram's experiment. We're treated to a trio of women being given the chance to confront Milgram after the fact where they can voice the psychological concerns of participants deceived into thinking they are harming another human being, and we see Milgram lose out on tenure at Harvard because the professional world didn't respond much better to what his experiment said on human nature. For me, all that was the interesting stuff. About halfway through the movie, we shift gears to focus on some of Milgram's other, less controversial experiments. It's all mildly interesting and serves to show that Milgram wasn't completely about exposing mankind's less popular features but I was hoping we'd get more drama from the obedience experiment and the aftermath. I suppose there might not have been enough material for such interesting dramatic piece and maybe we got a glimpse at the worst of it. We did get a fun visit with Milgram to the set of the TV movie "The Tenth Level" where William Shatner (Kellan Lutz) and Ossie Davis (Dennis Haysbert) are recreating the experiment in true '70s cheese fashion. It's all somewhat intriguing but the movie does lose a lot of steam.Apparently some elements of Almereyda's film were met with laughter when touring the festival circuit. You see, he's incorporated some weird visual elements that feel completely out of place. It all starts when we see Milgram's first monologue to the audience as he walks down the hall outside his experiment room, and an elephant comes around the corner and shambles up behind him. I assume it's some "elephant in the room" visual metaphor but I honestly didn't know what it was meant to tell me. It seemed to me that the character of Milgram was completely frank with the audience (and everyone in the film) and that there weren't any issues left unaddressed. Then we have bizarre uses of background projection (not just for driving scenes…an entire afternoon tea scene is set in front of a weird background projection) and a distractingly bad false beard Milgram acquires when we reach the late 70's or so. Why go weird? Why not play this as a straight drama? It started feeling like we were watching an odd stage play. A stage play with an admirable cast though. Sarsgaard does a fine job as MIlgram and we've got Winona Ryder as his wife Sasha. Comedian Jim Gaffigan has a minor role as the "student" in Milgram's team and his subjects have a steady stream of cool cameos including John Leguizamo and Anton Yelchin. As inexplicably strange as the movie is and despite the lull in the middle, EXPERIMENTER has enough positive notes to make it well worth a view for anyone interested in the subject matter.

Intelligent, challenging, semi-experimental view of psychological scientist Stanley Milgram and his seminal early 60s experiment that proved most people would follow orders that went against all they believe in - and caused them great personal stress - even to the point of believing they were causing bodily harm or death, if they felt it was expected of them and they wouldn't be blamed.Almereyda, long one of our bravest and least conventional film-makers, uses his tendencies to break from traditional storytelling to his advantage here. He breaks our usual illusion of 'reality' in a movie with black and white projections as parts of sets, the main character addressing the camera, sometimes about events that haven't happened yet, and even a (very funny) literal 'elephant in the room'. These playful, Brechtian devices distance us and keep us from emotionally getting lost in the story in the way a traditional Hollywood bio-pic would have us do. But it serves to heighten key intellectual questions about Milgram and his work – which also manipulated reality, and implied a certain artificial distancing between Milgram and the human race.Like a film, Milgram's experiment manipulated people, told them stories, to get them to react a certain way, and Almereyda makes us ponder a lot of these uneasy connections between art and science.Not all of these cinematic gambits work, and sometimes ideas get repeated beyond effectiveness. But I'll take this kind of fresh, jarring approach to looking at a man and the ideas his work over a traditional, shallower Hollywood approach any day.

I remembered reading about Stanley Milgram's controversial 'shock experiments' a while ago so was interested in watching this movie when it appeared on my Amazon Prime account.Peter Sarsgaard's lazy portrayal of Milgram is both fascinating and annoying. Whilst he is successful in making you believe he was Milgram I felt there was something lacking in his performance of a man who was driven in everything he did in real life by the horrors of the Holocaust. Even when confronted by a team of professionals to justify his experiments Sarsgaard's laidback style dilutes what should have been a moment in the film when you get to the heart of Milgram and what drove him on to do the work that he did.Michael Almereyda's device of having Sarsgaard (as Milgram) constantly interrupting the flow of the film by talking to the audience is novel at first but mildly irritating towards the end.Winona Ryder holds up her own as Milgram's wife. However, her character pretty much remains in the background - other than when she is called out by one of Milgram's students who tries to imply that Milgram's experiments are more to do with control, and controlling those around him, than a genuine scientific interest in human nature. The story itself is a fascinating one, however, and whilst the main actors are a bit watery/laidback, I think it will leave you wondering about yourself, individually, and the fundamental nature of the human race.PS : If you enjoyed this film, I would also recommend Craig Zobel's 'Compliance'.

Review: I really found this movie interesting and somewhat, intriguing. I didn't really see the point of the experiment when it first started but once Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard) started to explain exactly what he was trying to achieve, it did light a light bulb in my head. Its one of those films were there isn't an conclusion or a reason why people do what they do, which made the concept very debatable. Basically, in 1961, Stanley Milgram created a test were a person would ask another person various questions, and if they got them wrong, they would get an electric shock. The electric shock would increase every time the question was answered wrong, so the real test is; do you give them the electric shock if you know that you are causing the individual pain. If you ask anyone, they would say that wouldn't have given the electric shock but the statistics are quite shocking. I personally think that a lot of the people giving the shocks, felt that they had to go ahead with the treatment because they were getting paid but that just my personal opinion. The fact the the person in the other room was actually an actor and he wasn't receiving any shocks at all, makes the treatment very interesting and extremely deceptive. All the way through his life, Stanley Milgram was questioned about his tactics and outrageous results from the test, so he had to prove, numerous times, what he was trying to achieve. With that aside, the performances were great from Sarsgaard and his wife, Alexandra 'Sasha' Milgram, whose was played by Winona Ryder. I liked the way that Stanley was talking to the camera to explain certain matters and it's the first film were I have seen the director using the real black and white background to show how the real environment was. Anyway, I was thoroughly entertained throughout the movie but I personally think that the experiments should have taken place throughout the movie because the different people's reactions were what made the concept so great. Enjoyable!Round-Up: Although the cast seems quite big, most of the actors are only in a couple of the scenes during the test. It was  good to see the personal side of Stanley Milgram but you don't really get to know, what exactly is going on in his head. He seemed to glide through life in a world of his own but the director did show how important his wife and kids were in his life. Anyway, this movie was directed by Michael Almereyda, who brought you the awful Cymbeline (Anarchy: Ride or Die), Nadja, another version of Hamlet and Happy Here & Now. He hasn't got a great track record in the directing chair, which is why this movie didn't make any noise in Hollywood but it's still an interesting topic which was worth bringing to light. I recommend this movie to people who are into their biography/history/dramas starring John Palladino, Peter Sarsgaard. Winona Ryder. Anthony Edwards, Jim Gaffigan, John Leguizamo, Anton Yelchin and Harley Ware. 6/10