12 Angry Men

Twelve men are asked to judge on facts and end up judging themselves. This movie follows twelve people who are supposed to judge an alleged murderer on the facts that were presented to them during the trial. What you watch instead is how hard it is to give someone a fair and neutral judgment when everyone looks through a prejudiced lens they have built over a lifetime. The whole film plays out in a single room. The room itself changes as the men and their opinions do as well. The heat, the weather outside, the sweat in the room... all of that makes you feel like you are the 13th person sitting there. Sometimes the rain is loud, sometimes you hardly hear it. Men keep standing up to prove something, to replay a scene, to give a monologue, or to show they do not stand with bigoted reasons. Eventough you never leave this room there is pleanty of change happening. Scene after scene the men get more into it and start to understand that they have a real human life in their hands. What I love about this film is that you can see the certainties those men have fall apart in real time. The glasses marks make an undisputed witness almost irrelevant. Someone grabs the wrong knife and the illusion of a unique weapon shatters. A man, in a rage, shouts “I’ll kill you” without meaning it literally, even though prior to that those words were his smoking gun to sentence the alleged murderer to death. Bit by bit the air cools, the light comes on, the fan starts, and people begin to listen. The movie also brilliantly shows that the judicial system only works if people want it to. Some of those men take their choice over somebody’s life extremely seriously, while others want to go with the majority so they can make it to their baseball game. Some of the men form their own opinion only after spending a couple of hours in the room, having voted “guilty” plenty of times already. In the end this movie is not about right or wrong, and it does not even matter if the defendant is guilty or not. It is about how only one of 12 random people can put his ego, "proving a point" and his own baggage aside for a few minutes to uphold the judicial system and judge his peer without looking through his own subjective lens.