Battle Royale

Director: Kinji Fukasaku

Starring: Tatsuya Fujiwara, Aki Maeda, Taro Yamamoto, Takeshi Kitano

Every so often a film comes along society brands so controversial it elects to hide it from public view. Kinji Fukasaku's notorious Battle Royale is just such a film. Despite setting box office records in Japan, Fukasaku's blood-soaked ode to Lord of the Flies remains virtually unseen in the United States because the company that owns it, Japan's Toei Company, fears it would inspire unprecedented public outrage.

They may be right.

So why all the fuss? A brief synopsis of the film's plot makes it obvious. A class of ninth graders is taken against their will (but in accordance with an apocalyptic federal law known as The Battle Royale Act) to a remote island where they must literally kill or be killed. Students are provided weapons - selected at random, and ranging from the conventional (i.e. a machine gun) to the unconventional (i.e. a pot lid) - and ordered to murder their fellow friends and classmates. Those who refuse are killed immediately by military authorities. Those students who elect to play the "game" have a chance at survival - albeit a slim one, because at the end of three days, only one child can be left standing. If more than one is left alive, a tiny explosive embedded in each surviving child's necklace is detonated, killing them instantly.

Welcome to the bleak, brutal world of futuristic Japan - a world so callous that it officially sanctions the vicious killing of children by other children. It's a fictional environment, of course. But in a country such as ours - where brutal acts of student violence occur in high schools and on urban streets with all too frightening regularity - it's a fictional vision that at times appears far closer to reality than we'd like to admit.

Controversy and social commentary aside, the bottom line for movie-goers is that Battle Royale is a well-crafted, highly unique and entertaining film. Despite its notorious plot, the film is not mired by gratuitous violence. In fact, many of its most ostensibly violent scenes are purposely filmed in a nonchalant and detached manner. For example, names of the ever-growing tally of dead children appear on the screen with such desensitizing frequency that eventually the once verboten act of teens killing teens becomes almost - dare one say - ordinary. And clearly, that is part of Fukasaku's goal. "I am relating my experiences during the war (World War II)," the director (who passed away on January 12, 2003) revealed in an April 2002 interview with Rue Morgue Magazine (available in our links section at: http://www.suite101.com/links.cfm/7301). "I was 15 at the time (approximately the same age as the students in his film). I saw corpses. I collected and buried them. I learned the meaning of death and war."

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