Battle Royale (Batoru rowaiaru) - 2000 Blood Splattering Action Movie from Kinji Fukasaku
Battle Royale Tagline
Could you kill your best friend?
Battle Royale Synopsis
At the dawn of the new millenium, Japan is in a state of near-collapse. Unemplyment is at an all-time high, and violence amongst the nation's youth is spiralling out of control. With school children boycotting their lessons and physically abusing their teachers, a beleaguered and near-defeated govornment decides to introduce a radical new measure: the Battle Royale Act.
Overseen by a former teacher, Kitano ('Beat' Takeshi), and requiring that a randomly chosen school class be taken to a deserted island and forced to fight each other to the death, the Act dictates that only one pupil be allowed to survive the punishment. He or she will return, not as the victor, but as the proof of the lengths to which the govornment are prepared to go to curb the juvenile disobedience.
Likened to Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange by many critics, this explosive movie shocked a nation with its violent portrayl of a society in ruins.
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Battle Royale Movie Review
Although not strictly an Asian Horror , Battle Royale is jam-packed with blood-splattering violence and it is all the more disturbing due to the fact the violence is carried out between school children. The movie is a very darkly humorous look at the problem of youth violence and how far it could go. The fact that the adults of Japan are willing to subject children to this violence as if it were a game show adds a dark cynicism to the story.
The premise of the movie is that to try and solve the problem of escalating youth violence in Japan the government passes a law called the "Battle Royale Act" which allow the military to take a class of disruptive school children and dump them on an island. Each child is given a random weapon (which can range from a machine gun to a frying pan) and they are told they must fight to the death until only one class member is left. If this is not achieved in three days they will all die anyway.
Shuya Nanahara and Noriko Nakagawa are close friends and refuse to kill each other and make it their mission to beat the system. Although this is not going to be an easy task with their not so close classmates trying to be the last survivor plus the two additional people on the island (who have their own motives).
This move plays heavily on the emotions of the class members involved and focuses on the complicated relationships that exist between children at school. The desperate situation takes the traditional school characters such as bullies, the bullied, the swots and the not-so-clever to the extremes of their characters. The provision of a wide range of weapons and the dangerous landscape makes for some truly gory deaths, plus the twisty little ending makes for a highly entertaining Japanese movie.
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