NOVEMBER 8th 2017

Do you think a dictatorship can’t be established again? Do you think that an idea is not capable of influencing a throng of people? “The Wave” shows the opposite. The cinematographic readjustment, made in 2008, is directed by Daniel Gansel and based on Todd Strasser’s novel.

It tells us about how  a scholastic experiment turned into a dangerous organization.  When a professor realizes that his class doesn’t believe in the possibility of a second dictatorship in Germany, he decides to simulate one. He begins an experimentation on mass manipulation with his students: he was the group leader and progressively introduced a series of ethical and moral nationalist issues. They create a movement called “The Wave” and the professor teaches them the values on which a dictatorship must be based on, such as unity, discipline and action. The problem arises when the guys empathize too much in the “game”. They decide to dress up in the same way, with a white shirt and a pair of jeans, they create a greeting and spread out their symbol around the whole city.  They stain the walls, draw tags and involve in brawls those who don’t respect their tag.

Obviously, not everyone agreed with this experiment, and after many violent problems which led the students to hurt each other and exclude some members from the group, the teacher was forced to terminate the experiment.

 This film wants to alert anyone who thinks that dictatorships belong to the past.

Dennis Gansel shows clearly how a simple idea of unity was enough to convince some high school students to become extremists. There are a lot of differences between the book and the film, but, except for the end, they are marginal. For example, the first takes place in the United States, the second in Germany. The end, instead, has been changed totally, the film ends in a much more dramatic way than the book.