All right, I know that I should be writing up my final thoughts on the third day of Fangoria’s Weekend of Horrors, but considering the recent, near-groundbreaking announcement of this films upcoming remake, I felt I had to write this review before anything else. Please mind the rant at the beginning as I swear it is building up to something; this is just a movie that’s meant quite a bit to me and I gotta get this out.
There’s certain films we all feel rather partial to for one reason or another. Maybe they meant something to us at a certain point of our life or made us feel like nothing else had before. I’ve had many of these in my time, but none have had quite the impact on my life quite like Battle Royale. It’s funny in its own way, mostly because I hadn’t seen the film until last week. I know, a bit of background is necessary first. I’d first heard of the film shortly before I graduated high school in 2003 (ironically enough from this very website), and knew then that there was something different about it. For something like this to come about in a post-Columbine world, it sounded almost sickening yet amazing at the same time. Having had a pretty miserable high school experience, it sounded all the more intriguing as to see what this was really about. I’d wanted to see it for so long, yet all the same didn’t have the resources to get my hands on it. So, I had to make due with my own imagination, and being a vivid one that it was (and an aspiring writer to boot), I started my own little online novella of sorts based around Battle Royale. I know, fan fiction is nothing original or all that exciting, but this concept had stirred something inside me so to a point where I had to express my thoughts on it, and through fiction I did. Now, not being the most expedient of writers it took me the better portion of three years to actually do it, but it did happen. Since then I had found the original novel and read it enough to have memorized its every little nuance. I was hooked on BR, and yet the movie that had sparked my fascination was just out of my reach. Well, flash forward to Burbank’s Fangoria Weekend of Horrors ’06, and what happened to fall into my hands? Yeah, Battle Royale. I found it, I watched it, and years of anticipation turned out to not be for naught. Simply put, Battle Royale is an amazing film.
In the near future, the world is falling apart. Kids run wild, showing little respect for adults and boycotting school in droves. It’s gotten so bad that to remedy this situation, Japan has enacted what they call the Battle Royale Program. Simply put, every so often a class of ninth graders is kidnapped and placed on an island. Once there they are handed weapons and told that they must kill each other until there is only one person standing. To make sure that they abide by the rules, small explosive devices are strapped to each of their throats. Break a rule, it explodes. Wander into any of the designated “danger zones” on the island, and it explodes. If more than one person remains after three days, it explodes. Try to pull it off, well, you can guess what happens. It’s all that simple. The movie chronicles the experiences of what could be any random group of kids thrown into the game as they are forced to make their own decisions about what they want to do. Some people decide to play, others commit suicide, and some decide to fight the man.
The wonderful simplicity that is the situation we are thrust into is made ever the more real by the kids that are thrown into it. If you’ve ever been through middle school, you already know this bunch. The popular jocks. The slut. The fat kid everyone picks on. The activist. The dreamer. The horny guy. I’m just naming archetypes, but you can automatically place names to them. Some of them you may have considered friends, some enemies, some you may have even been in love with. Now imagine them all being given guns and knives and being told to kill each other off. The true horror from this film doesn’t come from the situation itself so much as it does what these kids are forced into. People who considered each other friends one minute are thrust into mortal combat the next. The girl you had a crush on could be your executioner. It brings back all sorts of memories, pleasant and painful alike, and then throws a rattlesnake into the mix. Battle Royale in many ways is a character study of the modern teenage mind, much like The Breakfast Club. But with automatic weapons.
And, yeah, all formalities and analysis aside, this is also an incredibly violent film. It’s not nearly as bad as you might expect given the subject matter, but all things considered it’s a pretty fucked up and very bloody film. Young kids are shot, stabbed, decapitated, eviscerated and impaled by the truckload. Now, given your average slasher film again this doesn’t sound so bad, but considering the fact that many of these actors are actually 15-year-old kids it happens to rather chilling effect. Considering the school uniforms that most of them wear, they appear even younger, which definitely ramps up the terror level of what we see going on.
The acting for the most part is very solid, with none of the kids truly lagging in what is admittedly a massive ensemble cast. Of particular note are Taro Yamamoto and Masanobu Ando’s polar opposite roles of island badasses Kawada and Kiriyama. Taro brings a particularly jaded edge to what would have otherwise been a pretty bland character, while Masanobu brings a particularly sickening glee. Kiriyama had always been my least favorite character from the book because he was so damn boring, but hats off to Ando’s awesome performance as everyone’s favorite Uzi-toting badass. Most recognizable to American audiences would probably be Chiaki Kuriyama (a.k.a. GoGo from Kill Bill, Vol. 1), and though her time onscreen is brief, she gives one of the films more memorable and shocking scenes. If there was a true star of the bunch, it would be none other than Takashi “Beat” Kitano as the deranged teacher/game overseer… Kitano. His manic and jaded performance wonderfully contrasts the horrors that he is overseeing and often taking part in, while the tender moments he has with young Noriko are touching, if a bit oddly placed in the film.
Sadly, Battle Royale was veteran Japanese director Kinji Fukasaku’s last completed film effort, as he passed on from prostate cancer during the filming of the sequel. Nevertheless, he does a marvelous job with the source material, turning a five hundred page novel into a tightly wound and paced action/horror film. Interspersing the horror with light classical music that plays over the islands loudspeakers every so often was an inspired touch that makes the experience all the more surreal for seeming so out of place.
They’ve just announced an American remake of this film, and already I have to admit I’m nervous. It could go any number of ways, and few of them I see are very good. I’m worried, not for the quality of the remake, but for the fact that said remake might actually diminish the power of the original. I highly doubt that as Fukusaku’s amazing film is extremely powerful all on its own, but all the same… the American remake machine has been pretty bad as of late. Here’s hoping for the best…
Buy Battle Royale on DVD from Diabolik DVD
Checkout our review of Cure
Checkout our review of Pulse.
