I'm Glad I Didn't Go To That School

I just finished watching my latest Netflix rental, a little Japanese flick titled Battle Royale. For those of you who are a little less than familiar with it, here's a quickie synopsis for you: Japan is experiencing a drastic youth uprising, so lawmakers pass the Millennium Educational Reform Act, nicknamed "the B.R. Act." This means that once a year, a random class of high school freshmen are selected to take part in a game called "Battle Royale." Not that that's a good thing or anything. They're rounded up, dropped on a deserted island with randomly assigned weapons, and are forced to fight one another to the death. They're given a strict set of guidelines and three days in which to whittle themselves down to one sole survivor, or else the collars around their necks will explode. It's basically like that movie The Condemned, except it's missing the reality show gimmick and instead of Steve Austin and the guy that played Juggernaut in X-Men 3, the contestants are forty Asian teenagers. Battle Royale came highly recommended from some folks up in New England, and I'd heard good things about it even before that, so I figured I'd give it a go.

Aside from the absolutely horrible subtitles, I have to say that I liked the movie a lot. It's almost as if the creators decided it'd be neat to add knives, guns, and explosives to Lord of the Flies. Naturally, there were a few parts I didn't get - like those wholly useless "requiems" added to the end of the movie, and why none of the participants had any idea that Battle Royale exists despite the last winner being all over the news - but other than that and the aforementioned bad subtitles, I had a lot of fun watching the movie. Though I will say that I thought there was a lot they could have done with it.

I think if the movie had waited a couple of years, they could have really played into the whole reality show craze. Battle Royale was released in 2000, when the only big reality shows were The Real World, Survivor, and Cops. They could have done it like The Running Man and had people taking bets on it, maybe watching it live on pay-per-view for $39.95 a pop. Just something to make that one scene with the paparazzi and the crazy smiling girl have some kind of bearing on the plot. It could have given the movie a shot at having some kind of social commentary about what kind of sicko would pay to watch a bunch of 14-year-olds kill each other in the most violent ways possible.

But the movie instead concentrates mostly on the Lord of the Flies aspect, with the kids who are trying to buck the system and end the game, others that buy into it and become heartless killing machines, and ones that are just trying to survive. The movie seems to borrow a little from Reservoir Dogs, evidenced in the lighthouse scene. The scene centers around a group of girls who have taken refuge in a lighthouse; one of them has secretly slipped poison into another girl's food, and the resulting death causes all the girls go crazy with paranoia and accuse one another of being the killer before pulling their guns and mowing each other down. It's an intense scene, one that is very much Quentin Tarantino's style to the point that it makes me wonder if he had a hand in the creative process. It also makes me hope that when the time comes for some American studio to produce a Battle Royale remake, they hire Q.T. to write and direct it. (And I also hope that in the event of a remake, Battle Royale will finally get an official release on DVD in the United States. Maybe they can put some mistake-free subtitles on there too, since that bugged me to no end.)

Pretty much everything about the movie is worth seeing. Director Kinji Fukasaku does a great job, as does his cast. The music - especially the classical stuff they work into it - is excellent, and the violence and gore are both bountiful and well done. So I'm giving it four stars on the patent-pending Sutton Scale, and a recommendation to check it out if you're in the movie's target audience. I imagine that ultraviolent movies such as this aren't for everyone, so if you're the kind of person that isn't into movies with a very high body count and a few gallons of blood, I suggest you avoid Battle Royale like the plague. Everybody else, track down a copy if you can find one.