I went and saw this movie Saturday, and I must say that I really enjoyed it. I thought at first this was going to be a bit too much like Dead Poet’s Society, but surprisingly was not.
Of course, me being a history buff, I really enjoyed the classroom scenes and the Julius Ceasar contest, and I actually knew some of the answers.
Sedgewik Bell really reminded me of some of the people I knew at school, and no doubt they also cheated and weaseled their way up the ladder.
I didn’t see any other threads on this movie, so I thought I would start one and see what you Dopers thought about this movie. Did you hate it or love it?
I saw it with my daughters, one of whom is currently attending the school Emperor’s Club was shot at. They liked it; I did not.
The central problems with the script were huge:
For example, why was it so easy for Hunnert to catch Bell, especially when he caught him cheating the second time. Having a tiny thing inside his ear wouldn’t have made him jump around like he had St. Vitus’s dance, which is what alerted Hunnert to his scam, and the grad student in the back of the room could have been hidden behind a curtain or something. Very lame. There were dozens of such plot holes throughout the movie.
In a larger, more artistic context, I would ask why the central event of the film Hunnert rewarding Bell and punishing Martin Blythe by changing Bell’s exam grade was so minimized. That’s really what the film should have been about. How can you have one character’s dishonesty being censured by another whose dishonesty, in some senses, is more reprehensible?