Two General Questions

1) Why did the students take this so personally? There weren't really being destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. It was a silly exercise in a class.

I haven't figured out a good answer to that yet. However, they weren't all taking it so personally. Georgina was very fanatic about the experiment, but she's obviously bent on "winning". Moreover, the kids were all quite privileged and probably grew up in a sheltered environment, this experiment might have been their first close encounter with 'being excluded', or with the harsh truth that things aren't always fair in real life. Or maybe they thought that the objective of the game was to get selected into the bunker, in order to get an 'A'.

2) How many people when given a folded piece of paper don't unfold it and read what is inside.

Well, they're also very docile kids who don't start talking among themselves when for example James runs out of the room with the 'magic box' under his arm...

We can see that Chips starts studying the piece of paper as soon as he had drawn one, so it's indeed rather implausible that he wouldn't have discovered the text inside. Maybe the pieces of paper were secured with a little bit of glue, so that it was apparent to the kids that they weren't supposed to open it yet. Or maybe as soon as they read the profession on their cards, their brains were busy figuring out how to make it into the first selection, and so they didn't pay more attention to this mere piece of paper.

I don't think it's a big deal; if the teacher had wanted, he could have easily devised another method that wouldn't give the second property/feature away too early (for example, write a numerical code inside the cards and have a poster ready where the second features are numbered and listed in alphabetical order), but this way just worked better for the narrative of the film.

By the way, who says that for example Mitzi, Bonnie or Parker hadn't looked into the inside of their cards already? And if they had, what does it really matter?


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Nuno Bettencourt - "Midnight Express"
https://y2u.be/KaMcf63f7Ic

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