Die Welle

A huge hit in its native country, The Wave（Die Welle） DVD box set is loosely based on true events (although they happened in California, not Germany) and stars Jurgen Vogel as hip, leather-jacketed teacher Mr Wenger, who's annoyed when he's assigned autocracy instead of anarchy during School Political Project Week. However, he quickly gets fired up when his class argue over whether or not a dictatorship could still happen in modern day Germany, leading him to encourage his students to form their own political movement.

Needless to say, their movement (dubbed 'The Wave'), with its accompanying white shirt uniform and slogan of 'Discipline through Strength' proves surprisingly popular and soon the whole school is getting in on the act. Unfortunately, it soon becomes clear that some students are taking The Wave far more seriously than others, with disastrous results.

After watching the Wave (Die Welle) DVD box set, it gives us a unique view of high school life, perhaps only to people who aren’t from Germany (where the movie is set), where it’s not only all about bullying, gangs, and boring, run-of-the-mill storylines involving cheerleaders or school newspaper headlines. It doesn’t show the students as immature but rather as having potential and interesting ideas of their own, which I think reflects the truth of the real world.

The group's creation ("The Wave" of the title) starts off like an innocent and fairly simple exercise to get the students to work together and show their true potential. But as the movie goes on there are some fantastic layers of complexity which build up as the group gets more and more out of hand. We go from trying to come up with names and logos to running about the town spraying graffiti and fighting with the rival “Anarchist” gang. The well executed way in which this complexity comes about can only be put across if you see the movie for yourself.