Film Review: Battle Royale
As far as inflammatory films go, the kind of films where, for example, a senior high school boy’s severed head is thrown through a window with a grenade in his mouth, few have managed to top Kinji Fukusaka’s kid-killing tour de force, Battle Royale (2000).
Often discussed in tandem with William Golding’s seminal novel The Lord of The Flies, the movie is more than a simple technological update — despite the premise of school kids killing and surviving (or not) on a remote island. It’s a far more severe crisis, since only one is permitted to survive (and then re-enter society) after the three day time-limit, which gives the film a full license to take school cliques, playground politics, squabbling over boyfriends, etc., to a darkly comic hyper-real plain where Zentsuji Class B’s students painfully shoot, poison, stab and mow each other down with a variety of weapons.
Predicated on a Japanese victory in World War II and so set in an alternative present, the extreme social tensions showing adults punishing naughty, naughty children through the genocidal Battle Royale Educational Reform act also gives the film it’s allegorical edge. Besides, perhaps any teacher having a bad week could maybe relate to the gleefully psychotic teacher, played by comic legend Beat Takeshi, who silences a talkative girl by throwing a pocket knife at her head (”I said, ‘No talking!’”), without of course giving into the urge to do likewise. The remaining horrified classmates continue to watch the hilariously genki video explanation and, sent out onto the island, react in different ways to the situation. Some opt to commit suicide, others hack into the adults’ mainframe computer surveillance and sweet little Mitsuko goes on a bloody serial rampage to ‘get back’ at whoever bullied her in school (”Why does everyone gang up on me!?”) Another boy admits he has a crush on a panic-stricken girl — but after she’s pumped four or five handgun rounds into him. To balance out the black comedy, the mordant on-screen graphics telling us the name and number of the dead boy/girl and the number “left to go” is oddly reminiscent of Kambei’s scroll in Seven Samurai, used to cross off the dead bandits.
Banned in the U.S. and deplored at home (though voraciously enjoyed by Japanese stundents - kowai?), this movie is arguably in tune with the mood of it’s day. Ijime (bullying), school drop outs and the problems of finding and securing an identity are very much real problems affecting students nationwide. In 1997, the Asahi Shinbun conducted a survey, asking the public to choose one word that describes society: a 37 percent majority said “confusion.” So when the survivors whom we follow throughout round off the narrative by becoming wanted criminals, we have to see Battle Royale as not only a brilliantly conceived and executed (mm, bad joke?) movie or as ultra-violent entertainment that’s too stylized to deeply shock, but as a brave commentary on the state of the nation which is not doomed to destruction but has to be aware of and to face problems that are, in essence, everyone’s problems.
And I don’t mean 17-year-olds running around with a pair of shears and a shotgun either…