41 YEARS LATER and nothing has changed...same old arguments

Good atmosphere. Shot really well. Feels real, hot, sweaty. A good look into the USA political underbelly from the view of hippy types and so on, from 1971. Still relevant now. The hippies mind set is now what id call modern alt right, with a few differences. And the modern left, well the less said the better. I agreed a lot with the arguments in this movie. For every point one side has in the movie the other side has a counter argument, so this movie is very fair and balanced. I didn't love this movie for some reason. I think it didn't have much of a conventional story telling structure, so I found it hard to get anything from it other than the messages and arguments. Amazing dialogue at times.

This movie is decently good, and remains extremely relevant even today but I just can't help but feel the antagonist cast is far too caricaturistic and borders on parody which I feel ultimately hampers some enjoyment of this film as the main cast present good arguments, great even, while the opposing force is just incoherent nonsense that borders on braindead.  Maybe that's the point? I really don't know, I enjoyed the film nonetheless even though it does seem inherently biased.

I really love how Peter Watkins presented Punishment Park as a documentary film and also encouraging improvisation among actors, majority which are real activists or little to no acting experience. Punishment Park continues to grow more relevant over the years and for movie that is now more than 50 years old, it still holds up well for a film that was made with less than 100k dollars in 1971. The behind the scene is perhaps much more interesting and there were some takes that originally didn’t intend to happen as much that made it to the film such as National Guards open fire on Activists that even Watkin thought was genuine. It’s worth the 89 minutes to check out Punishment Park.