I will keep this short because I'd much rather you read this account by Ron Jones, the teacher who started The Third Wave, than anything I could ever write.
Die Welle, or The Wave for those of us that don't know German, is a dramatization of an accidental social experiment which got out of hand as a teacher created a dictatorship in under a week. That part of the film is completely true and is incredibility frightening. Unfortunately, instead of telling a true to life accounting of events, like this one, the filmmakers felt it was necessary to crank the drama up to eleven.
Die Welle could share an opening scrawl with The Men Who Stare at Goats: More of this is true than you would believe. The problem with films that are based on actual events is the farther away from the real events the story drifts the more the audience believes that none of it is real. And, what happened in during The Third Wave was remarkably terrifying in its simplicity and the events should be much better known than they are.
The most obvious change from the real events was changing the location from Palo Alto, California in 1967 to modern day Germany. And while my personal prejudices says that this relocation, makes the story more likely and thus less scary, but Germany has its own unique history which makes it particularly cautious of dictatorships so all-in-all the change in location is basically a wash. And of course, this is a German film, so the German setting would have a greater impact on its intended German audience.
The movie was filled with obviously dramatized events: the logistically impossible graffiti, the financially improbable embroidery, the physical violence, the murder-suicide, and the teacher's arrest. And since none of these things actually happened and could be so readily picked as fictionalizations, it undercuts the reality of the true story at the base of the film.
Read it already.
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