I just saw Spiderhead on Netflix, read the review in Variety just to see what other people thought of it, and find myself once again in substantial disagreement with a critic venting spleen about a movie of TV series. Not that I thought the movie was overly good. But--
[Mild, general spoilers follow...]
The movie is adopted from a George Saunders story which I haven't read, so I don't care about how well the movie reflected the story, whereas the Variety critic did.
And there was one thing which in itself made the movie worth watching. It is, in effect, a dramatization of Stanley Milgram's "obedience to authority" experiment, back in the 1960s, in which Milgram discovered that subjects thinking they were in a scientific study were willing to mete out to pain to confederates of Milgram, who were working with Milgram, and pretended to be subjects and feigned pain. The real subjects were the ones one who turned up the faux-pain delivery on Milgram's command,
In Spearhead (the movie), the subjects are on both the delivery and the receiving ends of the pain, and the deliverables are drugs which provide all kinds of effects, ranging from erotic attraction to obedience to depression. And since it's fiction, the scientist is a flat-out bad guy, unlike Milgram, who confirmed a highly unfortunate aspect of human nature -- one which Milgram was already well aware of, doing his experiment just a little over decade after the concentration camps run by Nazi Germany were liberated.
The production of Spiderhead had its highs and lows. The music -- playing of well known songs -- was excellent. But suffering of the victims ... well, I would have been happy not to have seen (on this point, the Variety critic and I agree). The acting was adequate.
So ... if Milgram's experiment is of interest to you, or if you enjoy a movie about the benefits and drawbacks of emotions brought forth by drugs, check out Spiderhead if you haven't already seen it.
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