Battle Royale

Year: 2000
Running time: 114 minutes
Certificate: 18
Language: Japanese
Screenplay: Kenta Fukasaku
Director: Kinji Fukasaku
Starring: Beat Takeshi, Tatsuya Fujiwara, Aki Maeda, Tarô Yamamoto

Shuya and Noriko face the horrifying truth.

Nothing can prepare you for the first time you see this film. It is astonishing. In a future Japan where the economy is broken and kids run riot, a new piece of legislation, the Battle Royale Act, is passed and a randomly selected class of out of control school children get transported to a remote island and are given three days to kill each other off until there is only one survivor, or they all die. Unsurprisingly controversial, it is based on an equally controversial novel by Koushun Takami. The director Kinji Fukasaku was 70 at the time of making, and sadly died three years later, apparently one day into filming (the supposedly awful, although I've not seen it) Battle Royale II: Requiem, which was eventually directed by his son Kenta Fukasaku, who wrote the scripts of both films. Fukasaku claimed he made it in order to warn children not to trust grown-ups. It certainly manages that and then some, but there is more to it than that.

There is little time for character development or back story, but seeing as we've got to get through over forty kids in the running time, most of them would be dead before the back story could get started. Instead of being violence for the sake of violence, there is a fierce intelligence behind the film, which combines elements of love, friendship, paranoia and mistrust, bravery and fear as each classmate makes a decision to either kill themselves, fight for survival or work together. Much like Lord of the Flies (as adapted by Dario Argento), you find yourself wondering what you might do if you were ever forced into such a situation. Would you be the kid who flies into a panic and attempts to kill everyone for fear of dying yourself? Would you form or join a resistance and attempt to overthrow the architects of the game? Would you allow paranoia to cripple you and murder your best friend?

A tight-knit friendship ends badly.

We come to focus on two students in particular, Shuya (Tatsuya Fujiwara) and Noriko (Aki Maeda), who attempt to work together to find some way to survive. While they try desperately to stay alive, classmates all around them die in horrific, twisted, shocking and sometimes uncomfortably funny ways. The only character to really get any kind of back story is teacher Kitano (played to wearied perfection by Beat Takeshi), and as we come to learn a little about his home life and his feelings for a particular student he becomes more than a one-dimensional bad guy, more than simply an unfeeling child murderer. He's more like a lonely man who has lost his faith in the system he works for. And a child murderer.

As we rattle towards the climax and the body count rises the viewer soon finds that they cannot tear their eyes from the screen, continuing to stare in disbelief and beginning to route for their favourite student. Spellbinding.

Score: 8/10

There is a lot of love out there for Battle Royale, including these reviews by Chris at Sound on Sight and on Shade.ca's website.