The teacher downgraded the girl with the A+ chances, so what would have been the "right" answer to the experiment that would have lead to everyone graduating with an A? Or was it all just the teacher's personal agenda against the guy he didn't like?
The movie was so stupid it made me really angry. I usually don't get angry at movies but this one is ridiculous.
there was no right answer. as the girl pointed out in the end, the whole thing was not an experiment at all, but a role playing game dictated by the teacher to "punish" the girl and her new lover for leaving him.
yes, the film is stupid beyond belief.
"laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone." - Dae-su Oh
The right answer was to drop out of college, duh.
shareThe right answer involves the eliminating the teacher, the escape code, and non-existentialism (because the purpose of the experiment is the desire to survive).
Further, some good roleplaying choices would have helped (such as Petra taking away the gun) but perhaps could randomly work; skills that people have today usually run 4+ deep, not just 1 or 2. I would have said the gelato guy secretly can learn any skill overnight but has simply been Powder'ed his life so he couldn't quite use the skill till today.
true. killing the teacher first and taking his flesh for survival for have been a good idea for starters.
"laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone." - Dae-su Oh
It was class of philosophy, and this was not kinda role play, but actually kind of test.
These were not "the teacher's story" but everyone's story, everyone shared his philosophical thoughts, what he/she was doing there.
So in this way, the teacher was simply judging their philosophical development.
Personally, I did not like the final story (philosophically)
If i were teacher, i would also downgrade her marks due to taking such decision.
We do not need, all those useless persons if apocalypse happens.
I liked very much the poet was just shot dead, before he speaks another word.
Ok we respect and like the art and everything,
but when you are down to just survive...
you just forget all the entertainment.
Who likes the entertainment when your belly is empty!?
[You WILL invent entertainment by yourself, once you've plenty of food, shelter and security]
the first 5 minutes in the classroom where interactive, where they shared their favorite dilemmas. everything after that was not a test or philosophical. it was 100% dictated by the teacher.
"laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone." - Dae-su Oh
if it was dictated by the teacher,
then why he was kept out in first story?
and why, in 3rd story, when Petra said, now i take things in my hands, you keep out, he said OK!
And also, why in 2nd story, when he suggested multiple partners, and it was not accepted!?
It was NOT dictated. Everyone were sharing his/her thoughts.
yes, he was kept out and then dictated that he has the code to open the door and also dictated what happened next. there were 1000 ways how they could have get out, but NO the teacher dictates that they die.
he tried to dictate multiple partners and when that did not work he dictated the rest of the outcome.
by the time of the 3rd scenario petra had enough of his crap and ended the game in a similarily stupid manner as the rest of the film was.
so, by your logic petra did share her thought with the class that in scenario 1 she regularily would go to the door and see the teacher rot, while having a sad look on her face, which did not lead to the discussion what the hell she was talking about?
furthermore the teacher shots people in the head and the whole class say nothing in regards to that? ;)
"laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone." - Dae-su Oh
Teacher "shared" his own thoughts (not dictation)
when he said he has the code, it was not by "chance" or "dictation",
as later he revealed he was the bunker builder,
and he was bunker builder from start, as slip was in his pocket.
"he tried to dictate multiple partners and when that did not work"
"Furthermore the teacher shots people in the head and the whole class say nothing in regards to that?"
- nope, he dicated that he had the code. by the same logic any of the students could have said "and i have the backup code". it is stupid, really.
- giving the illusion of interactivity at one point does not mean interactivity. to make this more clear. in the third scenario the boyfriend of the protagonist gets caught sleeping with another dude. a) considering he hated having the gay role, you can not claim that that was his choice within the game. furthermore he then gets caught by his chick. how in the world is that supposed to happen in the real time scenario, so that it happens hypothentical scenario. if would have to be like this:
dude: "oh, i want to sleep with another dude in this scenario"
chick: "and i want to catch him and then be pissed"
sorry, no way. if you liked this film: good. i can't argue with that, but don't try to bring logic to something which could not be more far from logic.
- so? it was a hypothetical scenario. it is not as like they would suddenly be afraid of the teacher in real life, because he claims to be a cold blooded killer in a hypothetical scenario.
yeah, that's the only thing that we can agree to. they did good to not let him in. in all 3 scenarios though. once he shoots the first guy, they should have decided to kill him immediately. in all 3 scenarios.
"laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone." - Dae-su Oh
sorry but its not justr dictation when it is sucesfull , a good dictator has several plans that he can fall back to if one fails.
what doesn't kill you hasn't been done properly.
yes, he was kept out and then dictated that he has the code to open the door and also dictated what happened next.Mr. Zimit already had the code before he was kept out by the group. He used the same code to open the door when they entered the bunker for the first time, when he gave the twenty students a tour through the building.
- lol. yeah. if i ask you to guess a number between 1 and 10 and you say 6 and i then say "no, it was 4", then by all means it HAS to be that i always thought about the number four from the start, right? xD
- you believe quit a bit, don't you? xD
"laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone." - Dae-su Oh
Personally, I did not like the final story (philosophically)
If i were teacher, i would also downgrade her marks due to taking such decision.
We do not need, all those useless persons if apocalypse happens.
I liked very much the poet was just shot dead, before he speaks another word.
Ok we respect and like the art and everything,
but when you are down to just survive...
you just forget all the entertainment.
Who likes the entertainment when your belly is empty!?
I disagree.
For example:
The girl with the IQ of 200.
First - since they had books (and normaly computers) - she could learn (actually all could do that - they could even work out a plan what do to after they leave the bunker: how to build a raft/boat, surviving on this islands etc. pp.), second, her offspring would be among the fittest and thus most needed.
But ok, even Darwin was wrong:
Charles Darwin It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.
bluerisk; "The most intelligent one is usually the one most adaptable to change."
That has not been my experience. Usually it is the "most intelligent" person who is the most neurotic. Big Bang illustrates this to the absurd. Even the professors are nuts. The better indicator is the life experiences an individual has.
The guy that's had three vocations/professions is most adaptable - change doesn't scare him. The couple with 6 kids are able to adapt to change. For them, every day is different; every day has unique challenges.
Change in subject;
I thought that the fact that they ALL where willing to die at the end of each scenario demonstrated their unsuitability for being in the bunker. Survivors think of nothing other than SURVIVAL at all times.
An astronaut (after Apollo 13's near death experience) was asked what he would do if he had only 10 minutes of oxygen left. His reply was along the lines of, "For the first 9 minutes I'd think. In the last minute I'd do the best thing I could think of." This is not a quitter.
Pilots are taught when a crash is imminent, fly as far into the crash as they can . . . never quit flying the plane. As long as you are still having an effect there is hope for a better outcome. The alternative is to throw your hands up and count on luck.
Last subject change; in every scenario - GET THE GUN! He who controls the gun controls the outcome. Think about that in the real world.
very well put.
"laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone." - Dae-su Oh
Ya you answered your own question, no matter how you hard you want this to be a movie about a puzzle for you to solve so you can feel smart because you "figured it out" it's actually just a story about a jaded (and completely unlikeable) lover seeking a petty form of revenge.
There is no solution and, although I may be giving the film too much credit here, we certainly could speculate that this is intended as a commentary on philosophy in general. There are no solutions to the big philosophical questions in life.
The meaning of life? - unsolvable
Existence of God? - unsolvable
Is Schrödinger's cat dead? - unsolvable (unless we open the box...)
Those who argue the absurdity of the movie by pointing out all the flaws in the experiment, most notably the participants just making up events and outcomes willy-nilly with no respect for the puzzle that's supposed to be solved by logic, are simply choosing to willfully ignore the simple premise as outlined in my first paragraph.
The entire experiment has been designed for the students to fail. yurenchu is correct tho that the Teacher having the code wasn't actually one of the willy-nilly monkey wrenches, but something that he had planned out deliberately ahead of time. One can also assume he chose to casually announce the execution of the 11 outsiders as a calculated way to have the students exile him. Thus he could then proudly reveal his "wildcard" and declare that they all failed on their own merit. And now they have to eat their pets and then each other and then asphyxiate. Losers. It is therefore most likely safe to assume that, had the students, against all probability, allowed to let the teacher into the bunker he would have simply engineered, on the fly, a way for them to still all fail and die miserably.
This assumption is essentially illustrated and proven in the second iteration where the students do let the psycho live him. Of course, this was all calculated by the teacher which is why he conveniently ends up sleeping with petra in this scenario and then declares that we're all going to have loads of sex except for that stupid gay farmer dude man I hate that guy, right? Then you all die horribly again because you chose not to listen to me.
The third act, as yurenchu already pointed out in another thread, is all about the students rebelling against this hopeless and preposterously unsolvable scenario. James reveals the rigging of the game, and Petra, with her inside knowledge, understands completely and chooses to fight back. She starts to bend the rules to her whim as the teacher has been doing and the other students see this and follow suit. Of course we as the audience still don't have all the puzzle pieces yet so what we think we're seeing is some cheesy and ham-fisted message of "all those people you thought had no value are actually pretty nifty!" but, as we ultimately discover in the final act, what we're really seeing is "I'm going to do everything you don't want me to do and it's a super awesome hippy love fest and you're not invited!"
Teacher tries to regain control of course, and declare "ya, well, you all die!" (shocker) and so the final act of rebellion of course is "yah? well we want to anyway, pass me that kool-aid!".
Even a movie about an unsolvable problem has to end somehow. The ending here is that life is not a logic puzzle. It's emotional and messy and sometimes ugly and sometimes beautiful. I suppose you can read more or less into it all, that's up to you. I will say tho, that if you simply accept the basic premise of the movie being a story of petty revenge, everything actually plays out in pretty believable way.
Is it a stupid movie? I dunno, I've seen worse.
interesting view, but i agree with your statement that you give this film and therefore the script writer waaaay to much credit.
if one would write a film, that would actually do what you describe, i would love to watch that.
"laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone." - Dae-su Oh
The meaning of life? - unsolvable
Existence of God? - unsolvable
Is Schrödinger's cat dead? - unsolvable (unless we open the box...)
Bravo, great points all around. I was intrigued by the promise of a movie about thoughtful philosophy and instead I got exactly what you described except no where near as convincing.
But, speaking of the experiment, I would rather have 10 people who were capable, resourceful and creative regardless of their profession.
It's much easier to for such a person to learn how to farm than it is a farmer without these qualities to say... learn how to survive.
You know what's also ridiculous? The fact that no one even attempted to figure out the exit code in the first experiment. I think it only ended up being a 4 digit code, which means there could only be a certain number of options (10,000 max). I would think people motivated not to die, would be laying by the glass trying every code combination imaginable, until there was no oxygen left. He said because there was only 9, that they had several additional months of oxygen left beyond a year. But I guess killing yourself without even trying is way more logical.
This movie angers on many levels.
as it is supposed to be a thought experiment, at that point it should have already escalate.
personally i would not get the teacher get through with this BS.
i would type the code in and insist that it is accurate. if he disagreed i would take it to meta level and insist that it is i and not him that makes up the rules and that he just got hit by a lightning bolt. at that point it would most likely lead into a fist fight in the class room.
hmm, or better .. wait until he made up the code bs, stand up, walk up to him and punch his lights out without any advance warning. yeah, i wished they would have done that in the movie. that would be facking awesome. 30 minute runtime. straight to the point. yeah, i would have loved that. xD
"laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone." - Dae-su Oh
I was given this experiment to do in my school social justice class but with the rule that you could only ask 10 questions to help decide on your ten people.
No group succeeded as the trick was to ask for a second piece of info on someone who looked useless to survival like a teenage dropout runaway because the second piece of info was that they knew where to find additional air tanks, food etc enough that everyone could go into the bunker and live.
So with the group in the film you could use the farmers hydroponics skills for O2 and the chemists skills to make an CO2 scrubber and add extra survivors.
Assuming that you, as the self-proclaimed leader of the group and the only one with the machine gun, are prepared to take risks another logical solution is to let everyone in and let the people solve the immediate survival problems themselves.
If the problem was one of O2, food and water, and not one of overwhelming number of people (like pick ten out of one thousand), then they had plenty of brainpower and people*hours to figure that out. Best case scenario, everybody survives. Worst case scenario at least half of them die, but since they die anyway it's not that big of a deal. Of course, you have to be willing to take the risk.
According to me, the professor was way too utilitarian, which is not the best out of the most popular ethical theories. The solution in the third act was also not optimal, they lost 6 females, but it was understandable why they did that choice.
I wouldn't call the film a terrible one, but it could have been better. Still, this is good food for the mind.
It was all the personal agenda thing. Basically, it was one big rape fantasy on the part of the teacher. This should have been perfectly clear in the second scenario. Knowing this, the correct answer was:
Mr. Zimit
Petra
Georgina
Poppie
Bonnie
Yoshiko
Mitzi
Utami
Plum
Beatrice
Vivian
Omosedé