The roots of facism in Germany is a very touchy subject and this film takes an experiment from the 1960s in California and transposes it to modern day Germany. The experiment is simple, during a project week class on "autocracy" the teacher creates a movement in response to the pupils' scoffing at the prospect of people being taken in by a dictatorship again. Discipline is introduced and the majority of the pupils are pleased with and intrigued by the results, however as its popularity increases soon it starts to get out of hand.
This is an interesting film, not least because it's "based on" something that really happened (although it seems details of the original experiment are sketchy at least and probably exaggerated) but in engaging the audience in the same questions the students are facing it absolutely works dramatically. The scenes in the classroom are excellent, they're compelling, it's a shame some of the exterior issues such as subplots about couples and lonely guys aren't as vital as the rest of it. They are a little light, not as fleshed out as they could have been but they were trying to cover as much ground with the class as a whole as possible I suppose.
The acting is pretty good across the board, there's quite a large ensemble of kids in the classroom and they all play their roles nicely. Jürgen Vogel as the cool teacher and dictator-elect is the glue that holds the whole film together though, without him being believable the entire situation would be ridiculous and he controls the screen as well as his character controls the children. It's a very subtle performance, his character isn't someone with a masterplan, he just has an idea and lets it run before he can't control it any more and Vogel portrays all of this very nicely.
It is not unpredictable, you can guess how certain situations are going to develop, but that's actually the point because we have such a knowledge of this subject that it's more of an intellectual exercise to see how he's sparked the kids' interest and how their actions mirror what has happened before. The problem with it is the lengths they push it to, it seems the real life experiment was seemingly not dramatic enough (even though students informing on each other allegedly happened in real life but is not here in the film, that would have been very fitting). Where they eventually go with this film, the dramatic climax is so over the top it really does spoil what had been up to that point an extremely involving and well made film, albeit not without flaws.
When you have a film which is a cautionary tale about an event that was a cautionary tale ... making the very end of this film explicitly the ultimate cautionary tale is rather moot. The writers take it to extremes when it would probably be more interesting and stay with the audience longer if they were left to ponder for themselves what this whole experiment might mean for the people. I do get the feeling the filmmakers were just too tempted to go all the way and slightly missed the boat in the process - sometimes less is more. That said though for 95% of the film it's a very involving watch and well worth seeing and the end doesn't detract from that - it just prevents it being as great as it could have been.