AMD 1 Chris Haughey

For my AMD 1, I watched a film called The Wave. It is a modern German film that deals with the ideas of autocracy and manipulation. I had subtitles on of course. The plot of the story is fascinating. Students at a high school have to do a project, so they choose to do theirs on Autocracy because the teacher for the class is very popular. On the first day, the students tell the teacher, Rainer Wenger, that German is far beyond having an autocratic leader. Wenger then begins an experiment to prove this statement wrong. He redoes all the seating in the room so that high achieving students sit next to low achieving ones. Rainer makes all the students address him as Mr. Wenger and they must all stand when they want to speak and only say short, well-thoughtout statements. Soon, the class becomes much closer. Grades improve and even the bully of the class begins defending the weak against other bullies. A trouble teen, Tim, begins to truly love the group, now called The Wave, because he is usually a loner and now has a group to belong to. The Wave begins to wear matching clothing and only hangout together. They march together and begin spray-painting their logo everywhere. By the end of the week, The Wave gets into a huge fight with other students at a water polo game. After that incident, Rainer has an assembly with all the Wave participants and shows them that autocracy is very much possible in Germany just as they became part of a fascist group themselves. Some argue that The Wave was very beneficial. Rainer agrees, but states that the pros do not outweigh the cons at all. Tim, the troubled teen, then stands up and pulls out a gun, claiming that he will not return to being a loner. Bomber, the boy who used to be the bully tries to take the gun away. Tim shoots Bomber and then takes his own life. The movie ends with Rainer being arrested.
I thought that the movie was awesome. I also actually understood a lot of it. It was also cool to see kids my age speaking in German, which allowed me to pick up on normal, everyday talk. I needed the subtitles, but I felt as though I was still understanding the movie without them.