Battle Royale

Battle Royale made at least one list of the recent decade's best list, and I've heard a lot about it so finally got around to seeing it. I know it was a favorite of Quentin Tarantino's, who used one of its actresses in his own Kill Bill, Volume 1. I would characterize the film as a brilliant mess.

The premise is delicious and can't-miss. Japanese society is crumbling, and the youth are running wild. The government has instituted the "Battle Royale" program, which means that once a year, a random class of school children (who look to be about fifteen--they're called seventh-graders but look older than the U.S. equivalent of seventh grade) are drugged and transported to an abandoned island. They're each given a weapon (some are useful, like a machine gun, others are useless, like a pot lid) and turned loose for three days. The winner is the last one left alive. Now, this makes no practical sense. Since the kids have to have the whole concept explained to them (in a highly amusing videotape), it seems a poor deterrent. But that's okay.

So what we have is a combination of The Most Dangerous Game and Lord of the Flies. The kids make a mini-society. A group of girls domesticizes a lighthouse, while the tech-geek guys try to figure out how to hack into their captors' computer system. Two boys are ringers--one is a good guy, who once won the Battle Royale, and another is a lone wolf who signed up just for fun. There is the sexually loose girl who uses her beauty, and the two leads are the innocent kids who don't want to kill anybody. Watching over this is their teacher, who had enough of their rebellion and takes delight in tracking their deaths. I would imagine some teachers who watch this film will feel a little guilty in how satisfying it is.

The script, by Kenta Fukusaku, based on the novel by Koushon Tamaki, is great grisly fun. Title cards helpfully tell us who just died and how many are left. It plays like a fatal game of the reality show Survivor--the tribe has spoken, indeed. But the direction, by Kinji Fukusaku, is wanting. It's dark and confused and not very stylistic, and at times looks like a cheap drive-in horror picture. I kept wondering how someone like Tarantino would handle it. Also, the DVD version contains extra scenes, including a basketball game that frames the action, which is fine, but then a series of epilogues that do nothing but remind one unpleasantly of the never-ending Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.

I should add that I also found it difficult to tell all the kids from one another. I realize that's an ethnically insensitive remark, but there it is--all these kids are black-haired and dark-eyed. A few, like the lone wolf, are distinct because of hair-dye or other differences. I'm sure in Japan this was not a problem. A U.S. version, should one ever be made (one was scrubbed after the Virginia Tech massacre) would be able to make use of our ethnic diversity. Thank goodness for immigration!