directors
Kinji Fukasaku
Kenta Fukasaku
screenwriter
Kenta Fukasaku
based on
characters created by
Koushun
Takami
producer
Masumi Okada
cinematographer
Yuta Morokaji
music
Masamichi Amano
editor
Hirohide Abe
cast
Tatsuya Fujiwara (Shuya Nanahara)
Ai Maeda (Shiori Kitano)
Shugo Oshinari (Takuma Aoi)
Ayana Sakai (Nao Asakura)
Natsuki Kato (Saki Sakurai)
Riki Takeuchi (Riki Takeuchi)
Aja (Kazumi Fukuda)
Yuuki Ito (Ryo Kurosawa)
Kou Shibasaki (Mitsuko Souma)
Sonny Chiba (Makio Mimura)
Ai Iwamura (Mai)
Takeshi Kitano (Kitano)
Aki Maeda (Noriko Nakagawa)
mpaa rating: none
running
time: 133m
japanese
release: 7/5/03
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
fan
site
other kinji
fukasaku films
reviewed on this website:
- battle
royale
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The opening shots of Battle
Royale II redefine "audacious." The camera swoops
lazily in an aerial view of Tokyo, the buildings glowing orange
in the light of dusk. We single out two buildings -- which bear
a fairly blatant resemblance to the World Trade Center towers
that went down on 9/11. You watch this and you say, No. They're
not actually going to do it, are they? And then, heralded
by deep Dolby Digital rumbling, the towers go down. What's more,
we learn from the opening text that the hero and survivor of
the original Battle Royale
-- the nonviolent Shuya Nanahara (Tatsuya Fujiwara) -- is responsible
for this act of terrorism, and many others. Then we see grainy
video footage of him, AK-47 in hand, inciting the youth of Japan
to rise up against the adults. If the original film flirted with
controversy, the sequel has sex with it on the first date.
Battle Royale II has a famously difficult history.
Kinji Fukasaku, the veteran director of the original back in
2000, announced in late 2002 that he planned to direct the sequel;
he also announced that he was dying of cancer. Five days into
principal shooting (and four days before Christmas, which may
account for the sequel's pitch-black view of the holiday -- it
takes place mainly during the season), Fukasaku was hospitalized.
His son Kenta, who'd written the screenplays for both BR
films (and had once planned to direct the first one), took over
production, and the elder Fukasaku died on January 12. Barely
six months later, BR2 landed with a heavy thud in theaters.
And what a heavy thud it is.
Little of the mischievous humor of the first (for instance, the
cheerful video instructor played by Yûko Miyamura is conspicuous
in her absence) survives in Battle Royale II, a thoroughly
different animal than its revered predecessor. Its themes and
concerns spread wider, taking in the roots of terrorism, the
folly of military action, and the unending cycle of violence.
Does it work? Not always; some of the movie is overexplicit and
plodding. But where else did you expect a sequel to go? I'd say
Battle Royale II should be honored, not lambasted, for
going out of its way to set itself apart from the original. If
the first one nodded at Lord of the Flies, this one has
much more in common with, say, Apocalypse Now.
In the wake of Shuya's bombings
-- carried out with his terrorist group, "the Wild Seven"
(which has picked up many other recruits beyond its founding
seven) -- the Japanese government has passed a new BR act. Instead
of being shipped to an island to kill each other off, randomly
selected classes of ninth graders will now be shipped to Shuya's
island stronghold, given weapons, and ordered to hunt him and
his conspirators down and kill them. All this exposition is delivered
at a blistering clip by the government's new teacher liaison
(Riki Takeuchi, stepping in for the original's Takeshi Kitano),
who spews invective at the class (made up mostly of delinquents,
unlike the well-appointed, uniformed kids in the first one) and
writes down an impressive list of country names on the chalkboard,
asking what they all have in common. Answer? They've all been
bombed by America. (A dark irony: the actual island standing
in for Shuya's island is Nagasaki.)
Some may feel, at this point,
that the film is getting off on the wrong foot. The didactic
tone of the speeches may ring false even to those who agree with
it, and Riki Takeuchi, a big star in Japan, weighs in with a
glowering, hyperbolic performance as over-the-top as Kitano's
was stoic and subtle. But Takeuchi is your signal that this will
be a louder, more impassioned ride, with its mind more on geopolitics
than on survival. By encouraging Takeuchi to do such an un-Kitano
turn, Kenta Fukasaku may have been aiming to undercut the audience's
expectations right from the start. The way he kills off one of
the most intriguing-looking characters almost immediately --
a wild-haired delinquent girl played by the famed teen model
Aja -- similarly defuses our anticipation. All bets are truly
off here.
From there, Battle Royale
II becomes not so much a war movie as a scolding essay on
war movies. When the kids arrive by motorboat on the island,
almost half of them are cut down or blown up practically before
they even reach land. It's Fukasaku's rewrite of the legendary
Omaha Beach sequence in Saving Private
Ryan, with the added perversity that the mayhem involves
ninth graders -- though many of the doomed soldiers in the Spielberg
film weren't much older. Some critics of the sequel have questioned
why the government doesn't just nuke the island, instead of sending
inexperienced kids over. Well, do you expect war in general to
make sense? Whatever illogic one finds in the film is trumped
by the illogic we find daily in the newspaper (such as, say,
provoking a war over weapons of mass destruction where there
are none).
Many of the kids are interchangeable;
they're much more demonstrably cannon fodder this time out. The
plot essentially focuses on two people: Shuya, who has grown
weary of the death machine he has set in motion, but feels powerless
to stop it; and Shiori (Ai Maeda), who goes into battle determined
to kill Shuya and avenge her father, the teacher Kitano. (Maeda
is actually the sister of Aki Maeda, who played Shuya's co-survivor
in the original, and whose character Kitano was fixated on because
she resembled his daughter. Aki makes a small appearance at the
very end of the sequel.) Shuya, so pacifistic in the original,
is meant, I think, as an object lesson in how a violent society
can create its own menaces -- its own terrorists. Japan turned
Shuya into a killer against his will, and now the skills he learned
have been turned around onto Japan and its adult leaders. Shiori,
too, is motivated by hatred, even though in flashback we see
that she and her father weren't all that close. You get the feeling
she's using his death as an excuse to work off anger that has
more to do with his life.
Whereas Battle Royale
was trim and ingenious, Battle Royale II reaches higher
and broader, and is a much messier and more overarching affair.
I did not and do not judge it harshly for not being the first
movie. I came to appreciate the differences, the movie's airhorn
Oliver Stone-like insistence. It is clearly the movie Kinji Fukasaku
wanted to make and had planned to make; its perceived failings
should not be blamed on his son, who has delivered a piercing
and perhaps understandably mournful sequel, dense with rhetoric
and regret. Overlong, flawed, and hectoring, Battle Royale
II nonetheless claims its own kind of wounded brilliance.
The smiling little girl at the beginning of the first film, the
survivor of the previous BR game, reappears here, still clutching
her bloodied teddy bear, and still smiling; but this time she's
a terrorist, too. This sequel rolls into our current preoccupations
like a hand grenade.
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