Punishment Park 1971 123movies

Watch: Punishment Park 1971 123movies, Full Movie Online – “Punishment Park” is a pseudo-documentary purporting to be a film crews’s news coverage of the team of soldiers escorting a group of hippies, draft dodgers, and anti-establishment types across the desert in a type of capture the flag game. The soldiers vow not to interfere with the rebels’ progress and merely shepherd them along to their destination. At that point, having obtained their goal, they will be released. The film crew’s coverage is meant to insure that the military’s intentions are honorable. As the representatives of the 60’s counter-culture get nearer to passing this arbitrary test, the soldiers become increasingly hostile, attempting to force the hippies out of their pacifist behavior. A lot of this film appears improvised and in several scenes real tempers seem to flare as some of the “acting” got overaggressive. This is a interesting exercise in situational ethics. The cinéma vérité style, hand-held camera, and ambiguous demands of the director – would the actors be able to maintain their roles given the hazing they were taking – pushed some to the brink. The cast’s emotions are clearly on the surface. Unfortunately this film has gone completely underground and is next to impossible to find. It would offer a captivating document of the distrust that existed between soldiers willfully serving in the military and those persons who opposed the war peacefully..
Plot: In this fictional documentary, U.S. prisons are at capacity, and President Nixon declares a state of emergency. All new prisoners, most of whom are connected to the antiwar movement, are now given the choice of jail time or spending three days in Punishment Park, where they will be hunted for sport by federal authorities. The prisoners invariably choose the latter option, but learn that, between the desert heat and the brutal police officers, their chances of survival are slim.
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Ratings:

	7.7/10 Votes: 7,118
	92% | RottenTomatoes
	N/A | MetaCritic
	N/A Votes: 131 Popularity: 6.501 | TMDB

Reviews:

the more things change, the more they stay the same…
To think this film was made the year I was born. To think people are still having their constitutional rights taken away, now in the name of “homeland security”. To think this movie was intentionally banned from the American public. PUNISHMENT PARK addresses the political divide in the United States better than any movie I’ve ever seen. Had it been more widely seen, would it have changed anything? A movie like this is so polarizing, it has the potential to cause riots. It shakes you up and forces you to take sides. It makes you face the issue: are you for the people’s right of dissent in a time of war, or for the constitution being compromised in the name of “national security”? The protagonists are forced by the government to race to the American flag in a game that undermines the very ideals the flag stands for. The acting is totally convincing. So much so, I can’t see any acting going on here at all. If this is a scripted documentary, it’s more convincing than any reality show on television today. PUNISHMENT PARK is possibly the most important film ever made. It really makes you think.

Hateful movie
This is a very hard review to write, because this is a very hard movie to watch. There’s so many different ways to take it, and unfortunately it forces you to take it a particular way even if you don’t want to.

Punishment Park is about extremes, rightists versus leftists and the destruction inherent. Two camps of protesters are put together, the violent and the nonviolent, and both are punished together by being forced to trek 50+ miles through Death Valley in the middle of summer without water… if they fail, they die. If they succeed… well…

The thing is that this movie is hateful. It’s utterly predictable, but not in that way where it’s condescending or stupidly written, but in that terrible way where you know what’s going to happen and don’t want to see it, but do. It’s entirely a “necessary” product, one that HAD to have been made during the era it was, and unfortunately one that HAS to exist, even if it’s simply a terrible experience.

What angers me so much about it is that it proves itself. The way it’s a pseudo-documentary and it’s vastly leftist politics makes it almost insulting, makes you want to just ignore it as the ranting of a zealot. If the people are in the desert, for instance, with a camera crew nearby, why aren’t they asking the camera crew for water? And once they start to get desperate, how come they never attack the camera crew? Major difficulty in a movie where the director speaks.

Besides, the alien looking extreme rightists in this movie are almost laughably caricaturistic, making one really feel preached to. This movie seems to beg us to not believe it, to feel incredulous that such levels exist.

Yet the movie “exists” as it “actually happened” because of people’s treatment of it. It was banned in England, pretty much not allowed release in America, and got very little release in very little places. The credits roll, and the director/narrator points out that at least one of his crew was subsequently imprisoned. The treatment of this movie by those in power profoundly reinforces its themes, which is terrible because its themes shouldn’t exist.

And then I’d love to say that this film should now be forgotten considering the by-gone era, but noooooo!! Current political landscapes and people’s readiness to turn Iraq into another Vietnam either by making poor decisions or repeating said fact with slogans on picket signs makes this movie come back to the forefront again, a painful Big Brother, a terrible paean to the fear and hatred that consumed many during that era which people seem eager to reclaim in this era. Basically, it angers me to no end that this had to exist, it angers me more that it’s still palpible, but not because of the movie itself but what it represents.

–PolarisDiB

Other Information:

Original Language en
Runtime 1 hr 31 min (91 min), 1 hr 28 min (88 min) (Netherlands)
Budget 95000
Revenue 0
Status Released
Rated R
Genre Drama, Thriller
Director Peter Watkins
Writer Peter Watkins
Actors Patrick Boland, Kent Foreman, Carmen Argenziano
Country United States
Awards N/A
Production Company N/A
Website N/A

Technical Information:

Sound Mix Mono
Aspect Ratio 1.37 : 1
Camera Eclair ACL16
Laboratory Movielab, Hollywood (CA), USA
Film Length N/A
Negative Format 16 mm
Cinematographic Process Spherical
Printed Film Format 35 mm (blow-up)