The setting is of a British and West German film crew following National Guard soldiers and police as they pursue members of a counterculture group across a desert.

There, they will have to traverse 53 miles of the hot California desert in three days, without water or food, while being chased by National Guardsmen and law enforcement officers as part of their field training.

As the pacifists come near the flag they find a group of police waiting for them in ambush; it turns out that there is no way to win the Punishment Park course as the system controls it from start to finish.

Watkins heightened realism by using amateur actors, improvisation, and newsreel camera techniques, but he also had rigid control over editing to guarantee audience involvement and the clear expression of his personal vision.

Initially Watkins had a carefully detailed script, but as in his other films, he decided to allow his cast to improvise based on their own instinctive reactions while following a rough outline of sequences drawn up by the director.

On one occasion the participants identified with the situation so completely that the victims actually threw rocks at the pursuers, resulting in one opening fire in return.

The "newsreel" quality of the film was enhanced by desaturating the color and removing the traditional hard edge of the image through the use of Harrison diffusion filters.

In 2005, The Guardian wrote that "twenty-five years on, Peter Watkins's dystopian nightmare still grips, imagining hippies and radicals getting tortured for quasi-judicial sport by the National Guard".