"Battle Royale" - Film Review

 

Consider for a moment how many movies and tv shows feature a gun. Now consider how often when a gun (in the Chekhov-ian fashion) is then used to kill someone or least harms them. It’s substantial, but critics of pop culture’s effects on gun violence in the country miss the point. Gun violence’s excessive depiction isn’t the cause of all that gun violence in real life, but that doesn’t mean it’s not troubling. The more rape, murder, violence, etc. we show on tv, the darker and bleaker the world seems. Studies have shown that people who watch more hours of tv tend to find the world a scarier and more harmful place.

It becomes harder to justify violence when there’s simply no point to having it. Violence and gunplay in pop culture shouldn’t be there simply because c’est la vie. But rather, they should be there to make a statement about the nature of violence or some other worthy subject matter. 

All this is a longwinded way of saying: Battle Royale is pretty fucking violent. The film takes a gleefully sardonic, darkly humorous approach to watching 40 kids murder eachother Hunger Games style.

The film is highly self-aware of the absurdity of its premise of a dystopic death match staged by the Japanese government, and it spends very little time establishing its premise and more time throwing the kids right into this mess most of them never wished to be part of. Drugged on a field trip, the middle schoolers are shipped off to a deserted island, attached with tracking collars (that explode when taken off), and are informed they’re to fight to the death. 

The goofy, tongue-in-cheek, graphics-filled training video explains the nature of the games; they’ll be assigned a backpack with food, water, a map of the island, and a randomized weapon (ranging from guns and knives to stranger things such as crossbows, tasers, and a GPS tracking device). Within the next 3 days, if someone hasn’t killed everyone else off, they all die. Two “transfer students” have also been brought in to make things more interesting, including level-headed loner Shogo Kawada (Taro Yamamoto) who’s been forced to return to the game and the villainous, sadistic Kuzuo Kiriyama (Masanobu Ando) who’s joined for the fun of it.  Their former teacher turned douchey rogue villain Kitano (Takeshi Kitano) lords over the game, announcing when different regions of the island have been made off limits.

Our ostensible protagonists are Shuya Nanahara (Tatsuya Fujiwara) and Noriko Nakagawa (Aki Maeda), who, after watching their best friends die early in the game, team up to try and survive. And, by all logic, it’s impressive that they do. Early in the film, the story feels like a string of vignettes of people fighting and killing eachother in inventive and bloody ways. If it weren’t so stylishly shot and the premise weren’t stretching plausibility to begin with, the film might have become plain disturbing or silly or bizarre. However, it stays just on the right side of crazy. Unlike films such as much of the Saw franchise or Hostel which feature a torturous, almost obscene level of violence and blood at the expense of their characters, the film’s violence never feels pointless and is never used merely to provoke.

This is a bloody, bizarre, stylish rumpus that’s massively entertaining but not lacking in smarts. 

Grade: B+