MovieChat Forums > Apt Pupil (1998) Discussion > I happened to stumble on this movie on c...

I happened to stumble on this movie on cable


and thought it would be an interesting movie. I love everything Ian KcKellen does. It was brilliantly acted, and I was glued to the movie.

But for the wrong reason. This movie showed a very disturbed core of the human nature that only Steven Kiing can bring out. Evil feeds evil. The boy will probably grow up to be a sociopath serial killer. As the movie progressed you saw interest become obsession, the killing of the bird with no remorse and finally the murder of the homeless man. You also saw Ian McKellen showing no remorse for the atrocities he had committed as a Nazi officer.

This movie while not very violent in nature will stay with me and probably give me nightmares. Mainly because there are people out there with such a lack of humanity that the Holocaust could have ever happen, not to mention the genecide happening in Africa, and the murders we have today.

reply

I happen to stumble on this movie at local PL. Maybe because I'm a Jew, I don't know, but this one of the scariest films I've ever seen. Watching Ian march in that uniform sent a chill up my spine so cold that I'll never forget it.

Sometimes a being a bitch is all a woman has to hold onto.

reply

"The boy will probably grow up to be a sociopath serial killer"

Or perhaps an important politician or corporate leader. You don't have to murder someone to destroy them.

To my knowledge, not one Nazi leader who has been tried and found guilty has ever expressed any remorse for what they did. "I was just following orders" was one defense, and others firmly believed they were doing the world a service by eliminating people they thought were threats to society. It wasn't just Jewish people they went after, it was anyone who disagreed with them. It's a very dangerous situation when a relatively small group of people gain total unbridled power such as landed at the feet of Hitler, Stalin, et al.

reply

To my knowledge, not one Nazi leader who has been tried and found guilty has ever expressed any remorse for what they did.

Albert Speer, who was tried at Nuremberg just after the war along with Goering, Hess, Ribbentrop, and several surviving Nazi big shots (21 in all), did express remorse, and very convincingly. Basically he stated that while it was unreasonable to expect heads of governments, cabinet members, ministers, etc. to be personally accountable for every detail of whatever happened under their watch, that it was entirely proper to hold them generally and collectively responsible for a government's actions, and that he acknowledged that and accepted whatever sentence the tribunal passed upon him.

Whether he actually felt remorse is a different question; or if he did, to what extent his statements were motivated by that remorse. It's very likely that he perceived that the judges were getting more and more infuriated and disgusted with the other defendants; in particular, Goering consistently presented himself as a martyr going down in a blaze of Aryan-Nazi glory. Speer recognized that one thing the court (and for that matter, the whole world) wanted to hear was just one Nazi saying, "I'm sorry." Combined with the natural "public relations" advantages Speer had -- unlike the other defendents, who came across as thugs, he was articulate, urbane, and handsome (Leni Riefenstahl had once offered to cast him in a movie) -- the effect was he took on the role of "the redeemable Nazi" during the proceedings, and the prosecutors nearly treated him with kid gloves compared to their questioning of other defendants. He was able to deflect much of the blame for his crimes onto his subordinate, Sauckel, who was also on trial. Speer ended up getting twenty years (he probably should have been hung), whereas Sauckel and most of the other defendants were sentenced to death. (Three were acquitted.)

For the rest of his life (he died in 1981), Speer continued to play the role of the grandfatherly, ex-Nazi who had seen the light, paid the price for his wrongs, and turned his life around. His memoirs, Inside the Third Reich, became a best-seller, and he generally made himself available for media interviews, academic research requests, etc. However, one of the criticisms that some historians have levelled against the book and against Speer's portrayal of his actions was that he consistently omitted the most damning pieces of evidence; those which would have linked him directly to detailed knowledge of the abuses in the slave labor camps.

reply