This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

Disturbing yet enthralling

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

Every review I have read cries how it's not philosophy. Shut up nobody cares, you're not special. Just watch the movie it's entertaining

The idea sounded good and interesting but the execution and the plot are just plain terrible - intelligence isn't all that matters. That's more or less the outcome of this movie about "philosophy". Terrible nonsense and Kitsch, very slow paced and we watch some pretty Hollywood kids talking and talking - and yes, on top we get more talking. In the end, we know that the teacher had an affair with his A+ student. Sigh. But I got lucky, I didn't watch the movie in the cinema so I could use the fast forward button and saved some of my life time, that's what I call smart ;) If you wanna watch nice and clean looking people talking this is the movie for you. Last note: I would prefer mankind cease to exist if the only alternative would be that the kind of ppl portrayed in the movie or the writers of this piece of "art" would carry on the flame of mankind - the IQ in the universe would get an immense boost. Attending this class I would also prefer a) getting the bunker all alone for me with a few good books and some good records or b) the merciful death by nuclear fire instead of being imprisoned ONE+ year with that kind of people, nuclear fire would be a fast and clean death, to kill my mind and soul being in a cage with those kinds of ppl would be too much of a torture (just imagine all that BLABLA 24/7!!!), well, in the end, I am just another mortal being.

This film fails mainly due to it's convoluted idea of what philosophy is. Much like God's Not Dead, the film twists the basic concepts of philosophy to fulfill its own purposes and completely avoids any real attempt at philosophical reasoning or examination. In this case, the supposedly high-honors philosophy class focuses almost entirely on logic problems and fanciful what-if scenarios that have more to do with probability and micro-managing than anything else. Not only does the majority of the lesson totally ignore spirituality, existentialism, and morality, but when they do pop up they are treated as if they are enemies of philosophical thought because the defy cold reasoning and logic in some way. Then there's the professor, who intentionally cheats and manipulates the "mind games" just to agitate the boyfriend of one of the students he slept with, which would have been an interesting twist if it actually ended up having any real impact on the topics at hand. The fact alone that an advanced philosophy class would discuss a scenario involving perpetuation of the human species after a cataclysmic event without even debating the need to do so sets this film far below the intellectual level it so desperately wants to display. It's a good thing that they changed the title from The Philosophers, as that would have been a worst case example of false advertising. Or to sum up: there's nothing worse than a film that thinks it's smarter than it is.

I thought it was a great film. Sure, I didn't like the female lead because of her horrible acting but I personally didn't think it took away from the movie much. As others have said, the ideas are good and I think they executed it very well. Definitely worth a watch. I felt like it went by in a flash, I enjoyed it so much. But just a side note, I was originally interested in some philosophy before so you may not see it the same as I did. It's a bit different from the average movie, as in I feel it's best to watch while imagining yourself as one of the students and making your own judgments on the choices made throughout. It's quite thought provoking and a nice movie to watch if you want to relax (not much action) and, although it sounds contradictory to my comment about pretending to be a student, it's a movie where you can just take a backseat approach.