The Wave (Die Welle) - Movie Review

It is project week at the German high school where the student-popular Rainer Wenger teaches. For the next two weeks he must construct a project for his self-assigned students to complete. He hoped to teach the class on anarchy but to his disappointment Wenger was assigned autocracy. His sullied mood upswings, however, when the students become more invested in the project than he first thought possible, so Wenger challenges the class to experience what life is like under a dictatorship. Everyone is excited at first, but soon the entertaining project begins morphing the unified class into a legion reminiscent of Germany’s dark history.

The Wave (Die Welle) is based on the novel of the same name by Todd Strasser. The movie was brought to life, written and directed by Dennis Gansel (We Are the Night). There is near-perfect casting in the movie, particularly Jurgen Vogel as the rambunctious, unorthodox educator chided by most of his co-workers. Max Riemelt is the handsome popular athlete in Marco with the iron willed girlfriend Karo (Jennifer Ulrich). Frederick Lau portrays the socially awkward, fragile soul Tim who will go to extreme lengths to gain any kind of satisfactory acceptance among his peers and does a good job as he just looks the part and it seems to fit him naturally.

The problem with The Wave is that the story feels forced with too many intangibles working it he favor of the student’s united front. Some of these teenagers have known one another their whole lives and never spoken since childhood, others have only met in high school, but they all have their own social circles that rarely transcend one another, and in less than a week this assemblage of teenagers from every social status – the rich, the poor, the broken homes, the perfect portrait – all unite under a single sign in a vow to keep order and protect one another, and all for a school project. There was not enough elaboration into the purpose of the movement that justified the sudden fanatical endearment in their behavior.

The Wave is directed well, the cast is great, and while the idea is intriguing (particularly for me and my personal interest in German sociology in the post-Nazi era) the heart of the story lacks any support from the information and actions provided turning the movie into a tolerable cliché.