director
Kinji Fukasaku
screenwriter
Kenta Fukasaku
based on
the novel by
Koushun
Takami
producers
Akio Kamatani
Tetsu Kayama
Masumi Okada
Masao Sato
cinematographer
Katsumi Yanagishima
music
Masamichi Amano
editor
Hirohide Abe
cast
Tatsuya Fujiwara (Shuya Nanahara)
Aki Maeda (Noriko Nakagawa)
Taro Yamamoto (Shougo Kawada)
Masanobu Ando (Kazou Kiriyama)
Kou Shibasaki (Mitsuko Souma)
Chiaki Kuriyama (Takako Chigusa)
Ai Iwamura (Smiling Winner)
Takeshi Kitano (Kitano)
Yûko Miyamura (Training Video Girl Oneesan)
mpaa rating: none
running
time: 114m
japanese
release: 12/16/00
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
fan
site
other kinji
fukasaku films
reviewed on this website:
- battle
royale 2
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Children killing children:
that's the main reason that the superlative Battle Royale
hasn't yet gotten an official American release, and probably
won't anytime soon. (U.S.-compatible DVDs, some quite good, abound
on the web.) It's the conceit of the movie, and of Koushun Takami's
rather thick (616 pages in the translated version released in
2003) novel of the same name, that the Japanese economy is on
the skids and the government has lost all control over juvenile
delinquency. Enter the BR Act, which stipulates that a class
of ninth-graders will be selected by random lottery to participate
in a cruel "survival of the fittest" contest on a remote
island. Each student is assigned a knapsack containing basic
supplies as well as a weapon stuffed in there at random (you
might get an Uzi, or you might get a relatively benign pair of
binoculars). The kids are expected to kill each other off until
only one "winner" is left.
The opening twenty minutes
of Battle Royale, which explain all this and much more,
have a malevolent brilliance; the remainder of the film is merely
kick-ass. But don't mistake it for an amoral shoot-em-up. Veteran
director Kinji Fukasaku, who died early in 2003 while working
on the sequel, was not
interested in blood and guts for their own cathartic sake. The
heroes of the film, after all, are two peaceful kids -- Shuya
(Tatsuya Fujiwara) and Noriko (Aki Maeda) -- who just want to
survive from hour to hour without having to kill anyone. The
villains, aside from the impersonal government feeding its youth
into the meat grinder, are the natural-born killers -- kids like
the punky Kiriyama (Masanobu Ando), who joined up "for fun,"
and the spiteful bitch Mitsuko (Kou Shibasaki), who racks up
the most kills of any of the girls. It's hard to decide who's
scarier; Fukasaku, like Takashi Miike in Audition,
knew that the pretty smile of a Japanese girl, in the context
of sadism, can look like the ugliest thing you've ever seen.
Part of the reason that an
American remake of the movie would be folly is that there's really
no American equivalent to Takeshi "Beat" Kitano. A
wildly popular actor/director in his own right, Kitano shows
up here as a teacher named (ha) Kitano, who has been ignored
and mocked (not to mention knifed) by his students too often.
Now he works for the BR program, smiling ever so slightly as
he tells the unfortunate chosen class what's what. Enjoying his
power over his now-attentive students, he casually kills two
of them. Is he evil? Well, he develops shadings as the movie
goes on. Repeat viewings may reveal the teacher as a no-nonsense
drill instructor trying to instill in his students the life-and-death
stakes of this game, for their own good. I can't see anyone other
than Kitano -- his face partially immobilized by a real-life
car accident -- in the role; our nearest match might be Charles
Bronson in his '70s prime, or perhaps Lee Marvin.
Battle Royale is high entertainment in its own way.
The training video shown to the class, hosted by a chipper Yûko
Miyamura (who chirps things like "Listen to fight well and
with gusto!"), is beloved by anyone who's seen the film;
it's a vintage piece of sick comedy. The soundtrack, made up
largely of booming classical music, gives an epic, Kubrickian
scale to the proceedings. When the two grinning killers Kiriyama
and Mitsuko meet at last, the clash has weight and force; so
does a forest encounter between jogger Chigusa (Chiaki Kuriyama)
and a hapless boy unlucky enough to nurture an unrequited crush
on her. Many of the killings have their roots in hysteria or
previous enmity (the girls turn on each other with frightening
speed). Back at BR headquarters, Kitano tracks it all impassively,
perhaps hoping that this will be the year that one or more of
the students beat the program.
There's a reversal or two at
the climax, involving a mysterious and more experienced older
boy, Kawada (Taro Yamamoto), who takes the pacifistic Shuya and
Noriko under his wing -- either out of pity or because they remind
him of himself in earlier days. Other alliances are formed, too,
between a group of girls in a lighthouse whose civility crashes
and burns when paranoia enters the picture, or a trio of boys
who hack the system and have plans to bomb the headquarters --
we spend a fair amount of time watching their progress before
they run into the Uzi-packing Kiriyama. Fukasaku is saying that
in war, some bonds will come apart while others hold fast; it's
probably no coincidence that the bond that endures is the one
forged in the hope of peace, not out of convenience or collective
conniving. Battle Royale is a violent film that stands
against violence, and maybe that's the real reason for
its controversy. Violent movies that just use brutality as punctuation
don't threaten the order of things; violent movies that give
us to ponder the costs of man's inhumanity to man will always
be inconvenient.
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