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Customer Reviews of Battle Royale

At the dawn of a new millennium, Japanese society is out of hand.
Unemployment rates are at an all-time high; kids are skipping
school and physically assaulting their teachers. This has led to
the government introducing a new measure to keep kids in line -
the Battle Royale Act. Every year, a ninth-grade class is chosen
at random and transported to a deserted island, where they are
equipped with "Wedlock"-style necklaces that can be made to
explode, a map, a compass, food and water and a weapon. Their
goal is to survive for three days on the island - while killing
off all of their classmates. If, at the end of day three, more
than one person is alive, they are all killed.

The hero of this movie is ninth-grader Shuya Nanahara, who swears
that he will protect the girl he loves, Noriko, and somehow make
sure they both survive. He is unwilling to kill but desperate not
to die, an attitude not shared by all, as we are about to
witness.

As they are equipped with various weapons, ranging from pot lids
to machine guns, we observe how different their attitudes turn
out to be, from Nanahara who is devastated when he thinks he
accidentally killed another boy, to the machine-gun wielding kid
who kills everyone in his path without remorse.

"Battle Royale" has been compared to Stanley Kubrick's "A
Clockwork Orange". I would hesitate making that comparison,
mostly because I'm not a huge fan of Kubrick's. While "A
Clockwork Orange" is almost as disturbing in its violence as
"Battle Royale", the latter is in my opinion the superior film.
The sight of 15-year old kids dressed in school uniforms killing
each other with crossbows, sickles, axes and machine-guns is much
more disturbing than watching a bunch of freaks wearing false
noses assaulting a helpless man. It is hard to put yourself in
the position of Alex and his cronies in "A Clockwork Orange",
simply because they are so strange. This is not the case with the
kids in "Battle Royale".

The absence of flashy camerawork, slow motion and other cinematic
tricks transforms the camera from a machine to a nihilistic
outside observer. This is a trademark in Japanese cinema, and has
been used in films as varied in style and context as Takeshi
Kitano's "Violent Cop" and Norifumi Suzuki's "Star of David:
Beautiful Girl Hunter". Not to mention that making a movie like
this in the days of Columbine requires something that virtually
all American film-makers lack: guts. That no American distributor
dared import "Battle Royale" just goes to show how conformist the
once individualistic American society really has become.

So is there nothing about this film that could be better? Well,
yes. There are two things I feel should have been different.
First of all the length of the film. At a mere 109 minutes, it is
too short. I would have wanted another thirty minutes or so
explaining the background, to get to know the kids better. We do
get to know them through a few flashbacks, but I would have
wanted more. Had this film started out as a typical American high-
school film like "The Breakfast Club" or "American Pie" the
violence would have been even more disturbing. Second of all,
it's the violence itself. While I do not feel that violence is in
itself important to a film, it does serve a purpose. My objection
is not that there is too much violence, but that it is not
graphic enough. When I see a kid getting shot I don't just want a
squib going off (a squib is a small plastic bag or rubber balloon
filled with fake blood, which is made to explode to give the
impression of a gunshot wound), I want Dario Argento-style
effects where you follow the bullet through the body, showing the
effects of the gunshot in all their gory details. If that would
be too flashy for this film, why not at least use the great
Japanese tradition of special effects and make a film that makes
your stomach turn?

Nevertheless, "Battle Royale" is an experience unlike any other,
and if there was any kind of justice in the world this is the
film that would win the Academy Award for best foreign film. We
all know that it won't. This is a movie that dares question
modern society and what it is doing to people, and that is the
reason why it will never win an Oscar. It is not conformist
enough. That is why I love it.

All I can say is: "Arigato, Kinji-san."

Bloodthirsty, brash, deeply disturbing---and Fun!
Bloody! Riveting! Complete carnage! Mindless violence!

Absolute fun, in other words, and honestly you should stop reading this review RIGHT NOW and go watch it.

"Battle Royale" is a movie about a particularly close Japanese high school class forced by law to travel to a deserted island and engage in the "Battle Royale", which means they don weapons, head out in the woods, and fight to the death. They're free to go at it individually with knives, chainsaws, spearguns, machine guns, and hatchets, or they can form little teams, but fight they must, and by the end of the game only one can survive.

What happens if they don't cooperate, or if more than one survives by game's end?

I knew you were gonna ask that. It's simple: the government has fitted the students with exploding neck collars, so if they do anything the game controllers don't like---like, oh, smarting off against the instructors, or ending up in the wrong island zone at the wrong time, or ending the game with more than one student left alive---then their little collar explodes.

"Battle Royale" is easily one of my favorite movies ever, made in the wonderful place that is modern-day Japan, which has become Ground Zero for stellar modern horror. I suspect that this affinity for the darkest aspects of human nature may have roots in Japan's experience in the final days of World War II: after all, there's nothing like having your cities literally obliterated to awaken you to the realization that there are scarier things afoot in the world than mummies, werewolves, and serial killers in hockey masks.

At any rate, Kinji Fukasaku draws on that deep wellspring of horror to create something of a modern masterpiece and a very shocking film, indeed. "Battle Royale" is set in Japan in the near future, in a society which is on the brink of chaos. Youth gang violence is at a high, and students come to school only when they feel like it; as a means of preventing complete anarchy, the government passes the "Battle Royale" law. Every year a high school class, selected by lottery, is dispatched to an abandoned island, fitted with explosive collars, supplied with all manner of weapons, and sent to battle it out to last.

Fukasaku said that "Battle Royale" was inspired by his own experiences as a teenager working at an Imperial munitions plant in the final days of WWII; after a particularly deadly bombing raid, he says that he and his young co-workers survived by hiding beneath the charred bodies of the dead.

According to the director, he emerged with "an irrational hatred for the unseen forces that drove us into those circumstances, a poisonous hostility towards adults, and a gentle sentimentality for my friends", and that attitude is evident in "Battle Royale". Make no mistake about it, the movie is a shocker, particularly in the way the once close-knit high school class self-segregates into killers and victims.

But at the heart of the film is the bond between the protagonist and his high school sweetheart. The problem, of course, is that only one can survive. While some have blasted the movie for what seems like a saccharine romance between the two (illustrated through flashbacks), in light of what happens it only makes "Battle Royale" far more twisted.

"Battle Royale" has been alternately praised and pilloried for its violence, but to my jaded tastes it's not that much worse than standard American action-movie fare. What makes the film so stunning is that you see adorable little innocent-faced Japanese schoolchildren, in their school uniforms, stalking their former friends through the jungle with hacksaws, pots and pans, uzis, and steak knives.

The acting is actually quite good, given how young most of the cast is, and Japanese movie-star "Beat" Takeshi is actually quite good as the game's controller. I suppose it reflects poorly on me that I find "Battle Royale" hysterical, but it's one of those films that is just so disturbinly over the top that it's funny.

And really, the film also contains a silver lining: yeah, high school may have been bad, but hey--- "Battle Royale" proves it could have been *much* worse.

A true foreign film classic!
This movie is truly awesome. It works on every level from social commentary/satire, horror, action, drama, romance, and just pure fun. This is what people who dismiss subtitled films are really missing out on. Now that I'm done gushing, I'll give you the review. The film involves a group of around 40 students in a classroom that has been randomly chosen for the government's BR (Battle Royale....duh!) program. The children are gassed and placed on a secluded island where they are shown a hilariously satirical (and extremely upbeat) instructional video instructing them that they are to kill each other and the last boy or girl standing gets to go home. Each student receives a package containing water, map, compass, etc. and a weapon, some useless like a soup pot lid and some lethal, such as a sickle or even a machine gun. Any resistance explodes a steel collar that has been placed around each student's neck. Let the carnage begin! Kill Bill fans will recognize one familiar face in the brilliantly psychotic Chiaki Kuriyama (minus her ball-and-chain). As the killfest commences, different strategies emerge. Some students seek and destroy their former comrades while others band together and hide out and some simply do themselves in rather than participate in the blood bath. Some even hatch a plot to hack into the BR computer system and bring the battle to a halt. Then there's that mysterious "exchange student" who showed up in class for the first time on the day of the Battle Royale and seems just a little too thrilled with it all as he mows down everyone he comes across without a word. So much fun! You see each and every death and the movie counts down the students as they die until it's all over. The battles are very gritty and real; sorry, no kung fu or anime-style sword battles. This is the most enjoyable foreign film I've seen since Versus, and this is by far the better film. If you have even heard of this movie you owe it to yourself to own it. It begs to be watched again and again. Heck, with such a strong premise, Battle Royale could be a franchise in the making; it could literally be remade a dozen ways and still kick ass. Anyhow check it out, you won't be dissappointed.