Previously on Filmstalker I wrote about Sean Bean's new film The Cache and we had the barest of plot outlines at the time. Now though there's a much bigger plot appeared and it sounds fascinating the film also gets a title rename as it is now called The Root of all Evil.

It seems that the plot is going to give Sean Bean a lot more to get his teeth into, it's not just the standard bad boy role that he so often gets from Hollywood, after all he looks rough and rugged, has a great sneer and carries an English accent, perfect for a bad guy. Sigh.

The outline from Moviehole tells us much more about the plot, and reveals that it may be based on one of the most important and influencial social experiments of our time:

“...a psychological thriller which examines three stark and not so flattering truths about human nature -- Man’s cowardice versus his courage, women’s sexual attraction to “bad boys”, and the morality of money. These truths are woven into a thematic overview inspired by a 1961-62 Yale University obedience experiment by Dr. Stanley Milgram which proved the ease with which human beings shuck all personal responsibility for heinous acts or crimes while under the influence of an outside authority.”

Wow! Tell me that isn't intriguing. There's a lot more there than at first thought, and so this could mark a rather interesting role for Bean.

It seems there's rather a large crowd out there that thinks Sean Bean often gets the short end of the casting stick, and I just hope that at some point casting agents listen. Maybe they already have?

We already heard that Steve Anderson is set to direct this story, and a little digging into Dr. Stanley Milgram tells us that his controversial experiments into obedience were used to explain the events of the My Lai Massacre, a film that Oliver Stone will be making, as well as discussed in relation to the trials of various Nazi officials.

Milgram's experiment is the famous one for obedience, where an instructor and “teacher” subject are in one room and a “learner” subject (an actor) is hidden away in the adjacent room. The teacher asks the learner questions and when they get one wrong the teacher is told to administer an electric shock using a scaled panel, each time increasing the scale.

The teacher can hear the pain from the learner in the room and this increases according to the scale of the shock administered. If they pause or stop the instructor tells them they must continue.

The surprising results were that most people did, and half even went to delivering a full 450-volt shock three times in succession.

What's also interesting is that the idea of six degrees of separation comes from one of Milgram's experiments too. He tracked chains of acquaintances in the U.S. Using parcels and a letter telling the recipient who the parcel was intended for, they were to forward it to someone who was more likely to know the target person than they were.

A fascinating story indeed, so how far is the film going to delve into this area, or is it just going to use it to describe the plot? I would really like to see something a lot deeper and meatier for Bean to play, perhaps this could be it?