Battle Royale (Director's Cut)

Directed by Kinji Fukasaku and based on the novel of the same name, Battle Royale is a tense and gripping action thriller, with some horror elements thrown in for good measure.

In alternate reality Japan at the beginning of the millennium, the country has virtually collapsed; unemployment is at an all-time high and the youth of the nation is out of control, schools and teachers desperate and without hope.

The Battle Royale Act is established as a last resort, passed by the government in hope it will reign in the teenagers through example and fear. The ‘battle’ itself is between a class of teens, shipped against their will to an evacuated island where they are forced to kill one another until only one remains, and if a winner is not determined after three days, they all die.

The hook of this film is the characters, how they are developed and how they meet their ends, what drives them to keep together as friends or kill their former classmates without hesitation. There are ‘good’ guys and ‘bad’ guys, messed up kids from all walks of life. Yes, it hits all the clichés, but these are high school kids. Fukasaku is excellent at keeping us tense and as paranoid as the students, and keeps our concentration on a few key groups throughout, adding each one after our main characters meet them. One group tries not to give in to this sick game whilst one plots a way to overthrow the system, others just try to stick together and last as long as they can. The main cast do a damn good job for their age, especially with the extreme alien concept. Unfortunately whilst one of the ‘bad’ guys (the class’s former teacher who oversees at least this round of student massacring) is a great character with as many problems as any of the students, the other (a student who willingly signed up to be part of the battle) is completely devoid of any explained motive.

The addition of the ‘kill screen’ where we see the names and student numbers of those who have just died keeps us locked in and gives us a sense of scale and focus that we are all too often deprived of in larger scale full-on action affairs.

 

The effects aren’t great to look at, and with such a focus on the visceral and gory deaths (due to the randomly assigned ‘weapons’) I did expect more. It’s also pretty hard to believe a teenage girl of any origin could still be alive and kicking after taking half a dozen bullets to the chest. I would also have liked to see a more present depiction of the need to avoid the danger zones; any student caught in these areas at certain times will be killed instantly.

Battle Royale carries a powerful message about what people are capable of when pushed to the brink; individually, as groups and a society. Though a lot of issues are left undeveloped or neglected (the state of the country as a whole, what event triggered the government to consider the law etc.) and a very odd ‘twist’ that should have been dealt with better.

Battle Royale is an interesting movie with message and action, and though there are plenty of undeveloped ideas I commend both writer and director on keeping focus on the characters and how human/inhuman they are.

Definitely worth a watch. 7.5/10.