people who don't understand why they didn't run...

There were always slaves (gladiators and etc.) who rebelled even though they were born into slavery. People will always seek freedom, some more desperately than others but still.

another obvious real life similarity is the holocaust. 6 million Jews murdered by a few hundred thousand Germans and how many resisted? not many. its not the same situation because the Jews had experienced freedom their whole life before the war but still, it seems, accepted their fate without much of a fight.

i like to think if i was in the same situation as the pre WW2 Jews in Germany and Poland i'd rather die fighting than in a gas chamber, but i wasn't there. how can anyone possibly know what's that's like until it happens to you?

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Your explanation doesn't make much sense because they didn't actually want to donate. They were terrified at the perspective of "completing" and wished the "deferrals" existed. So yes, to me it didn't make sense that none of them would try to escape: not that they would actually manage, but the plot should've included something like that and the reasons why they couldn't/shouldn't.


My ratings: ***** **** *** ** * ·

On the book Kath reffers to being told but not told a lot of things since they were extremely young.
She doesnt remember when exactly but at a young age they were already trying to get her to understand she was different and so on.

As OP points out this can take a huge tool on people.


However, I fail to see how someone that doesnt know this is brainwashed

The explanation "it's because they've been brainwashed" is really not enough to make it plausible for me. As others have said, people have always sought for freedom and the right to live, in all of history, no matter what circumstances. People were being brainwashed in the Third Reich as well, yet there were people living there who revolted against their rulers simply because they realized how wrong the regime was. Jews revolted or tried to flee concentration camps, thousands of them fought against the Germans, etc. "They were brainwashed" is just not a good enough excuse to have all of them walk towards their deaths willingly, and what also needs to be said is that there was hardly any brainwashing seen in the film.

What would happen if this was a real scenario: A good size of them would try to escape or even revolt against this ordeal, and the majority wouuld at least question if this whole thing was right and just and if there were ways to escape, they would talk abut the topic, while in the film no one ever mentions it. Underground resistance movements would form (also consisting of "regular" people as not all of them would agree with this organ slavery), working to support the escape and hiding of slaves, and surgically removing their transmitter chips (if they had any), giving them new identities and trying to smuggle them out of the country (escape attempts in prisoner camps come to mind here). Of course there would also be resistance movements out of the regular population, assassination attempts against politicans, leaders of the system, etc.

Now since the original author wrote this whole story as an allegory to humans living according to the rules of their society without any doubts or questions (although people in the real world actually question the rules of society), it can be excused in a way. But if you judge only the movie itself, it's definitely a big plot hole IMO.