STAY ALIVE

US, 2006, 85 minutes, Colour.
Jon Foster, Samaire Armstrong, Frankie Munix, Wendell Pierce, Milo Ventimiglia.
Directed by William Brent Bell.


Whitwell Middle School in rural Tennessee is the setting for this documentary about an extraordinary experiment in Holocaust education. Struggling to grasp the concept of six-million Holocaust victims, the students decide to collect six-million paper clips to better understand the extent of this crime against humanity. The film details how the students met Holocaust survivors from around the world and how the experience transformed them and their community.

For the first five minutes, Stay Alive looks like a computer game blown up for the big screen. Then, we find that it is. But, we also find that those who play it finish up dead in the same way that their characters die in the game. Moral: stay alive.

This is niche market movie-making. Anyone who is not into computer games may well find it too contrived, too mechanical, too brutal and too much like a game. Since I cannot speak for computer game aficionados, I don’t know whether the fans want to take time off to leave their computers and their games to watch a show where they don’t have their hands on the controls.

The plot is a variation on the Old Dark House kind of thriller. A vindictive New Orleans aristocrat from the past is resurrected when players read aloud her verse at the opening of the game and she indulges in lethal pursuit. One of the problems with this kind of story is that the players are not particularly engaging as characters and, emotionally, you are not sure how much feeling you want to invest in worrying about their staying alive. And, in this case, not all of them do.

Quality of acting is not to the fore (in a cast which includes TVs Frankie Muniz in a not particularly persuasive performance), so it’s really the excitement of the game that counts – either for or against.