This movie absolutely insults the viewers intelligence. Hey, lets end the world so we can have some fun. Btw smuggest movie I've ever seen

I thought it was a great film. Sure, I didn't like the female lead because of her horrible acting but I personally didn't think it took away from the movie much. As others have said, the ideas are good and I think they executed it very well. Definitely worth a watch. I felt like it went by in a flash, I enjoyed it so much. But just a side note, I was originally interested in some philosophy before so you may not see it the same as I did. It's a bit different from the average movie, as in I feel it's best to watch while imagining yourself as one of the students and making your own judgments on the choices made throughout. It's quite thought provoking and a nice movie to watch if you want to relax (not much action) and, although it sounds contradictory to my comment about pretending to be a student, it's a movie where you can just take a backseat approach.

I would say that this movie started off great, but in all honesty, I don't think that it did. While the imagery was impressive, the characters were all unlikable. It was nearly impossible to sympathize with a pretentious group of young people and their narcissistic 'holier-than-thou' teacher. We begin with a game about a hypothetical situation that our students refuse to play, because pretending about death offends their delicate sensibilities. With the dramatics that go on, including our leading lady attempting to walk out of the class, you would think they were being asked to actually kill people. Sophie Lowe played our lead, Petra, who's character is apparently the smartest to ever attend the school. Her acting was atrocious. Absolutely awful. Her character was the second worst in the move, following only the teacher himself. The delicate rose petal of a genius is supposedly morally superior to everyone else, because her way of thinking is apparently the best way. This, by the end of the movie, is proved to be untrue. Our professor is played by James D'Arcy. I've seen this actor in other projects and always thought he was decent, but his performance here was awkward and forced. Maybe he found his character as distasteful as I -and the other characters in the movie- did. Normally I love a good movie, but it was hard to watch a teacher bully a group of students under the pretense of "stretching their minds". The logic behind the game Mr. Zimit creates is flimsy at best and is obviously self serving, in fact, he creates for himself a player that wins out no mater the scenario. His obsession with Petra, and hatred for her boyfriend, is obvious from the very beginning. The romance in this story is thrown in for literally no reason. It has nothing to do with the actual theme of the movie. Instead if just makes for poorly filmed make outs between to actors with no chemistry and gives the teacher something to be bitter about. Whoever wrote this movie seems to have learned everything they could about philosophy from Wikipedia.

I think most of the other reviews sum this film up quite well. This review is more about me exasperating about a film that had so much potential but failed to deliver.Take a philosophy class and take the end of the world scenario as set out in the film... now explore the choices made according to different philosophical ideals about morality and you have a great film.Instead this film works on the pretense of logic based on skill set and eventually sets that against hedonism. To have a philosophy teacher supposedly some sort of genius that people from around the world send their brightest children to Jakarta to learn from him but falls down at his own logic and premise of selection and then fails to recognize hedonism explains how one reviewer can be left angry at the film.The film also has some glaring plot holes in it...SPOILER ALERT Why would they choose an electrical engineer in a post apocalyptic world without easy access to electricity AND why wouldn't they attempt to hack the control panel? But then, as I am sure anyone watching the film would scream at the screen, logic dictates that if your goal is to repopulate the earth then surely any choice would require 8 females and 2 males with the greatest possible ethnic diversity offering the greatest gene pool potential... and skill set would only factor as a secondary choice.But... we would still be left with a film that failed to explore morality from different philosophical view points which the film initially appeared to set out to explore with the train scenario. Ultimately that is what we as viewers were led to believe that this film supposedly set out to explore... what are the moral principles of choosing one life over another.What this film actually does is provide an argument that the Arts are just as important as the hard sciences... and that while the hard sciences provide us with the tools to survive, the Arts provide us with the skills for civilization. Without the Arts life is mundane... however, the final exercise scenario provides us with the only other real philosophical position in the film to challenge a logic based on skills... a hedonist view point where it is better to destroy oneself in excess of pleasure than to survive because that is what allows us to live and that is what defines civilization.It is easy to over-think this film... I could quite easily make the argument that the film represents a picture of the current modern world whereby we live in a hedonist society built on desire and greed that define what it means to be civilized in the Western world and that the excess of civilization is in itself leading to the world's own destruction. This comes from the final hedonist selection of candidates, its final scenario, and the placement of the film in Jakarta but with Western English speaking actors demonstrates that perceptions of civilization stem from Western values. The final scenario set on a deserted island far removed from Western society survives the mutual self-destruction of a nuclear war. However, I somehow don't think the makers of this film had that in mind and any such analysis would be a classic case of reader response theory whereby the viewer is owning the meaning of the film (in this case) far removed from the author's intent. I do like another reviewer's suggestion concerning the teacher and Plato's cave and I can see where that idea stems from but I have to question whether or not that is merely a case of over-thinking too. After-all the reference to Plato's cave comes in the latter half of the film and it is not made clear at the start of the film that this is what is being set out to explore. It could also be a case of the writers and/or director taking the film in a different direction after exhausting the nuclear war scenarios. The final ending to the film itself certainly gives that impression. Ultimately, I have given the film 5 stars because it does allow such discussion to come from the film... I don't, however, think the film is particularly well executed and should a film really score highly if the only things taken from the film are those that we as viewers bring to it ourselves? There is an argument for that to be the case... after all that is what Alice in Wonderland is ultimately an exercise in and any film or book that is a metaphor of reality.