I suppose it’s not considered in particularly good taste to watch school children killing each other off for entertainment, but the dexterity with which director Kinji Fukasaku milks the “murderous game” concept for drama and satire is remarkable.
The setup could be described as Mean Girls with machine guns crossed with Lord of the Flies by the way of the Schwarzenegger trash classic Running Man: in future Japan, a class of forty students is selected to fight to the death on a secluded island. Everybody is given a random weapon and kept under control with exploding necklaces. Like Highlander, there can be only one survivor. Multi-talented Takeshi Kitano combines his game show host and actor personalities in his role as the former teacher who cruelly oversees the fight.
Once the “game” is established, Battle Royale excels in using overly familiar high school scenarios and reimagining them with deadly weapons. Here are the popular girls, for whom the cut-throat competition to be the #1 princess just got a lot nastier. Here are the geeks who stick together and hatch a plan, the lovebirds who try to find their own way out, the freshly transfered students hiding secrets, the boys with the tragic crush on the wrong girl.
We get to know a good many of the forty quickly diminishing students, and most of them could have jumped right out of a sitcom — but the stakes here are cranked up so high that what usually would have been an ordinary schoolyard confrontation becomes a matter of life and bloody death. Even more so than last year’s Brick, Battle Royale is terrifically engaging because it literalizes what everybody already knows: high school is murder.
Batoru rowaiaru. Kinji Fukasaku, 2000. ****
The trailer:
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Some of this movie seemed poorly thought through to me. I saw it a couple years ago, so my memory is hazy, but I seem to recall that the Battle Royale involved this big media frenzy, an extremely popular broadcast a la Running Man with lots of press interest …
Yet the class we see selected seems to have never heard of the contest, and has to be filled in on the rules, and seems totally baffled that such a thing exists.
To my memory, anyway. I recall being very frustrated that the filmmaker hadn’t bothered to completely think through the implications of the world he was creating. A sign of a popcorn movie, I reckon, rather than great cinema.
We may have agreed on Black Book, but we disagree here. Here’s what I wrote back when I saw this two years back:
Battle Royale (2000), Kinji Fukasaku, F
Jordan | Jordan Hoffman’s Movie Journal | Tuesday, August 16th, 2005
Ah. . .here it is. The most morally reprehensible film I’ve ever seen. It takes a lot to offend me. And I wasn’t so much offended by the plot (a class of 9th graders dropped onto an island and forced to kill one another) as the tumultuous shifts in tone, cheesy camera moves or complete inability to construct a plot or character. Basically, as you watch this film, and one of the “talking” scenes comes up, the dialogue and acting is so bad that you start getting itchy for more killing. Luckily more killing (and violent, bloody killing!) is just a moment away. This film is, essentially, killing porn. As a member of the ACLU, it goes against my nature to call for a boycott of anything — but a psychological inquiry of the makers of this film might be in order. I can take a shocking film. Starship Troopers may even be more violent than “Battle Royale,” but it has (a) humor and (b) a point, making it, in my opinion, one of the greatest films ever made. Sal�o, or 120 Days of Sodom is certainly the most disturbing film I’ve ever seen, but it is artfully made, has context and tone, (probably) has a point, and even though it is “far out” there is care taken to make it make sense. (does anybody understand what happened at the end of “Battle Royale?”)
Fascinating–and not just because I know Jordan almost never gives anything an F.
Kerry, you have a point there about the plot hole, but I think it’s minor. The kids needed to not know about the Battle Royale so that we could have it explained to us. It’s slightly shoddy storytelling, but very forgivable–we really just needed to get to the Battle itself as quickly as possible.
And honestly, I think this movie is “great cinema,” for the reasons outlined above. The drama is just extraordinary. I generally don’t give anything 5 stars the first time I see it, and I try to stay away from half stars, but FWIW, Battle Royale is a very high four.
Now Jordan, with all respect, I disagree with just about everything you’ve got to say. I’m usually a somewhat moralistic critic–I think a) art is allowed to do anything and b) art matters, and therefore c) you have to watch closely what it says and does. But Battle Royale didn’t set off my sensors in that respect. The comparison to Starship Troopers is very apt, but I do believe BR has both lots of humor and a serious point to make. Maybe it was the wine, but we were laughing pretty hard throughout the movie. Like Starship Troopers, it’s satire, and as I tried to describe above, I felt there was plenty of character and plot. The students are all types, so we don’t need long introductions. Whatever shorthand the director used worked fine for us–these kids, and their stories, are instantly recognizable.
You’re right about the ending–it’s all very anime tripped out, and the lousy subtitles didn’t help. That doesn’t really undermine the greatness of what came before though. Maybe we should organize a repeat screening soon, possibly on Rozger’s plasma screen?
Dr. Faustus –
I’m certainly up for a 2nd go-round. Who knows what my state of mind was when I first saw this. Perhaps I was taking it too seriously and instead was horrified by the violence — I do remember one sequence — something about a girl being taken to a respite in a windmill or something? — that I thought was very good.
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