7.2 | / 10 |
Users | 4.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Psychologist Philip Zimbardo simulates a prison in the basement of a Stanford building, with volunteer students divided into "guards" and "prisoners".
Starring: Olivia Thirlby, Ezra Miller, Thomas Mann (V), Billy Crudup, Callan McAuliffeBiography | 100% |
Thriller | Insignificant |
Drama | Insignificant |
History | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English: LPCM 2.0 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English SDH, Spanish
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (C untested)
Movie | 4.0 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 3.5 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Barely a decade after social psychologist Stanley Milgram astonished the world with his
"obedience experiment" at Yale, another psychologist,
Philip Zimbardo, created an equally
notorious phenomenon at Stanford with his "prison experiment". Funded by the U.S. Navy, Dr.
Zimbardo recruited student volunteers to simulate a prison environment in an effort to
understand the roots of conflict between prisoners and guards. The simulation spun out of control
so rapidly that the two-week experiment had to be shut down after only six days. Zimbardo
subsequently scripted a documentary, Quiet Rage, and published a book,
The Lucifer Effect, about the experiment and his subsequent work.
Zimbardo's "Stanford Prison Experiment" has penetrated popular culture just as deeply as
Milgram's work on obedience. Author Mario Giordano used it as inspiration for his novel The
Black Box, which was adapted into a German film called Das
Experiment (2001) and an English-language remake, The Experiment (2010). Various TV shows have modeled plots on Zimbardo's
simulation, the most recent example being the "PhDead" episode of ABC's Castle
(October 5,
2015).
As its title suggests, The Stanford Prison Experiment (or "SPE") dramatizes the actual events of
Zimbardo's experiment instead of a fictional alternative. Producer Brent Emery commissioned
the script from Tim Talbott (a former writer for South Park) in 2002,
after which the project
entered a long period of development and delay. Throughout the process, however, the core
principle was that the actual events of Zimbardo's experiment needed no embellishment to make
a compelling film. The challenge was to assemble a large cast of sufficient talent to bring the
experience to life, then find a way to stage the action cinematically in a confined space. The
assignment eventually fell to director Kevin Patrick Alvarez (C.O.G.).
SPE premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2015, where it received the Waldo Salt
Screenwriting Award for Talbott's script and the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize for
Alvarez's direction. IFC Films released the film in theaters the following July. The Blu-ray first
appeared as a Best Buy exclusive on November 15 and is now available in general release.
The Stanford Prison Experiment was shot on the Red Dragon by cinematographer Jas Shelton
(Jeff, Who Lives at Home). Post-production
was completed on a digital intermediate, where the
flat and largely monochromatic image was gradually darkened and "roughened" to create a visual
evolution that matched the story's dramatic arc. MPI/IFC's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray was
presumably sourced directly from digital files.
The simulated prison scenes have a flat, dull look that, together with the limited color palette,
emphasizes the "prisoners'" sense of being dumped into limbo. Whenever the action steps
outside these corridors, the color palette is immediately richer and more varied, and the
perception of depth is enhanced through the use of shadow and darkness. (Probably not by
accident, Zimbardo is frequently shown in rooms with limited light.) The Blu-ray captures both
visual styles in a sharp image with good reproduction of fine detail, the better to appreciate the
Seventies costumes and hairstyles and the increasingly haggard features of the simulation
participants. SPE is not a pretty film, but its cinematography serves its subject matter.
MPI/IFC has mastered SPE with an average bitrate of 35 Mbps, which would be a good rate for a
project originated on film. For a digitally originated project, it is more than sufficient.
SPE's 5.1 soundtrack, encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA, is a precise affair, where specific sound
effects (e.g., a "guard's" baton smacking a table, a fire extinguisher being triggered, or a prisoner
pounding on a wall) are loud and clear, cutting through the hermetic isolation of the simulated
prison and sharply contrasting with the continuing elements of dialogue and environmental
ambiance. The sound mixers have taken care to keep the many different voices distinct and
intelligible, even when it isn't necessarily clear which "prisoner" or "guard" is speaking.
(Michael Angarano's "John Wayne" can be easily recognized by his Strother Martin impression,
but the rest of the "prisoners" and "guards" tend to blend together interchangeably.) Andrew
Hewitt (The Double) has supplied a spare but
effective electronic score.
As is routinely the case with MPI's Blu-rays, an alternate PCM 2.0 track is also included.
The duality of cop and criminal is an established theme in crime dramas. (As Jack Nicholson's
mob boss observes in The Departed, "When I was your
age
they would say we can become cops,
or criminals. . . . When you're facing a loaded gun, what's the difference?") The same theme
informs SPE, where, as Billy Crudup's Zimbardo points out, the only thing that separates the
"guards" who became abusive from the prisoners being abused was a coin flip. Would the
simulation have played out differently if the coin flips were reversed? No one can say for sure,
but Zimbardo's experiment, like Milgrim's, demonstrated how easily a person's behavior can be
altered by an institutional structure, even a pretend one. In the debriefing tapes, a former "guard"
protests that he's a nice guy who was simply playing a part, to which one of the "prisoners"
replies that he still hates him, "[b]ecause I know what you can become." Provocative and highly
recommended.
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