The Wave

Dennis Gansel’s film rests on a real event: the Third Wave, run in spring 1967 by history teacher Ron Jones at Cubberley High School in Palo Alto. Jones ended it on day five, telling the students at a rally they had been deceived and screening Nazi propaganda films. Nobody was shot. The ending is not from there. Todd Strasser’s novel, written as Morton Rhue and a school text in Germany, has no death either; the gun and Tim shooting himself came from the screenplay. Where most of the audience read the book in class, only the last minutes are unknown. Jones approved that ending as a what if scenario. Gansel’s grandfather was a Wehrmacht officer, and he thought German students had had their fill of Third Reich lessons. The school scenes were shot in summer 2007 at the new Marie-Curie-Gymnasium in Dallgow-Döberitz, Brandenburg. The town is never named: the point is the whole country. Two and a half million Germans saw it, and Frederick Lau won the German Film Award for supporting actor. A good fit if you want the teacher likeable from the start, so the danger comes from a method that works, not bad intent. Not for readers waiting for the ending of the book they had at school; the death was added here.