Battle Royale Review

My immediate thought after watching Battle Royale is that it's a lot smarter than it needs to be from a financial standpoint. No matter how intelligent and sophisticated humanity likes to think it is it takes very little for us to be taken in by art with no value past fulfilling our most basic, primal desires. This can be evidenced by the popularity of such mediocrity as the Spartacus TV show and, alternatively, Sex and the City. My point in explaining all of that is to point out that if Battle Royale was just about a bunch of Japanese high schoolers forced to brutally slaughter each other in a dense forest with guns, knives, crossbows and swords it would've been a smash hit regardless of how little it had going on thematically. This makes the fact that the writers and director decided to make what could've just been another Japanese action film a sophisticated satire all the more admirable.

The premise might sound strangely familiar to those of you who were around during the short-lived reign of the young adult genre at the movies. A class of Japanese students is kidnapped by the government and commanded to kill each other with the ultimatum that if there is more than one person left alive after three days the government will kill everybody who remains.

From the setup alone anybody who knows anything about Japanese culture could probably guess the film's satirical point immediately; it's basically a giant metaphor for Japan's secondary education system. For those who don't know, Japan (as well as many other countries in East Asia) has some of the highest educational expectations in the world. How well you do in school and on your final exam scores generally determines where you will end up in society for the rest of your life. This, therefore, puts students under a lot of pressure to succeed academically and paints school life as a kind of competition for survival: if somebody else gets the highest score on the final exam that means you're left with a slightly lower role in society than you might have if you had just studied for two to three hours more. Turning that situation into a literal fight to the death serves to criticize how ruthless and uncompromising the system is.

So Battle Royale is ultimately more satisfying if you're willing to look a bit deeper into the subtext, but how does it hold up if you don't know anything about Japanese culture and just want to watch a bunch of kids kill one another? Well, you absolute psychopath, you'll be pleased to hear that it's quite a well-made action movie all on its own. The cinematography and editing are excellent in the fight scenes, making every conflict fast and intense. The fight choreography is also great, striking the right balance between stylized and realistic; they don't flip around like ninjas, but they're not so uncoordinated that they can't land an effective punch.

The acting from the kids as all pretty good, but the only performances you'll end up remembering are the always captivating Takeshi Kitano as the overseer of the blood sports and Kō Shibasaki as a particularly insane student.

I think the element I like most about this film is how it portrays the students. When I initially began watching this film I expected it to be mean spirited, with all of the students already starting out as blood thirsty sadists who want nothing more than to carve their fellow students brains out with a katana. However, only two or three of the kids are portrayed that way and the rest of the students are written realistically; these are kids who have gone to school together for the past four years, maybe even longer. They've formed bonds, made friendships and developed crushes that make it difficult for them to even think about killing each other. However, when they do get to a point where they do start killing each other it's understandable; they're under extreme stress and they're developing suspicion, both of which would drive even the nicest person to madness.

Battle Royale is a great little movie. It's got great action, fascinating social commentary and some pretty memorable performances. However, I'm not sure if it's worth watching ever again. After you've seen the bloody action and have deciphered the school commentary there's really not much deeper you can dig. That being said, I'm glad I saw it and won't be forgetting it any time soon.

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