Tonight on Amazon: Released 15 years ago, this film remains of rare relevance and deserves a 4 out of 5 rating.

Today in Germany. As part of the workshop, a high school teacher offers his students an experience that aims to explain to them how a totalitarian regime works. Then begins a life-size role-playing game, the consequences of which will be tragic…

“Strength through Discipline, Strength through Action”

Do you believe that a new dictatorship is impossible? So wait until you see The Wave, which is available on Prime Video. Released in cinemas in 2009, the film tells an absolutely thrilling and, above all, completely authentic experience. Originally, it was an American teacher, Ron Jones, who created this role-playing game in his classroom in the late 60s.

Faced with the disbelief of the students in his modern history class at the horrors of the Nazis’ enslavement of the German population, he decided to put it into practice and conducted the “Third Wave”, an experiment in functionalism. Dictatorship and mob manipulation.

He convinces his students of the importance of eliminating democracy because it can stimulate individual action. Individualism is a defect of the democratic spirit, opposed to the general interest summed up in these words: “Strength through discipline, strength through community, strength through action, strength through pride.”

“Individualism and the atomization of our societies cannot work forever”

inspired by real events, Wave There is also a Tod Strasser novel and children’s literature classic that has been on the curriculum of many German schools for over twenty years. Denis Gansel’s adaptation was very successful across the Rhine.

Before they knew how much the Nazi issue was seen and discussed in German schools, the screenwriters Wave He wanted to talk about it, placing the danger in the fatigue that sets in when we begin to think that speech is already largely mastered by repeated repetition.

For the director, it is the lack of ideals in today’s world that will lead to his downfall: “Individualism and the atomization of our societies cannot function forever. Such a context inevitably creates a vacuum and the danger is the new ‘ism’. appears to fill it,” he confided during the release of the film.

A merciless demonstration of totalitarian mechanisms, where Jürgen Vogel, outstanding in the role of the professor, shines. Wave It has not lost its power 15 years after its release, on the contrary.

With Europe, where increasingly authoritarian regimes exercise increasingly disturbing surveillance of the masses, to the detriment of individual and sometimes fundamental liberties.