Battle Royale (2000)

Directed by Kinji Fukasaku
Starring Tatsuya Fujiwara and Aki Maeda
Runtime 121min. (Directors Cut) - Not Rated
4 Stars (out of 4)

This review is part of The Lamb's "Movie of the Month" series. Available on multiple V.O.D outlets and DVD/Bluray.

I have no idea why students are being forced to kill each other in "Battle Royale" and I don't really care. The film opens with the briefest of explanations that include something about a student uprising and the subsequent passing of the "BR act" by legislators. I suppose they had extremely overpopulated prisons and were looking for an effective deterrent. They found one.

The film opens with a group of 7th graders ditching class. One of them cuts their teacher in the leg as he runs past. I was unclear on whether or not it was an accident. My confusion over the incident may be purposeful since it becomes a recurring theme. Fast forward 2 years and those same students are on a field trip. They all seem like normal kids. The closest thing to combat they're worried about is jockeying for positions at the back of the bus. Through the windows the students notice some ominous military vehicles. Soon after that they've been gassed and brought to a strange facility.


The film is impactful thanks in large part to its first-person point of view. If we were watching from some neutral vantage point this material would seem like human cockfighting. It's important that the viewer is privy to the motives and circumstances surrounding each character so that their death has meaning. This kind of filmmaking means we get share fear and confusion with the characters.

Don't be fooled into thinking this is a psychological thriller. Well, it is, but like many Japanese films it doesn't ignore the viewers' thirst for blood. In the first 20 minutes a blade is thrown into the forehead of a young girl and one of her schoolmates is killed via remote control explosive necklace. On a related note, the Japanese have much higher blood pressure than Americans, at least when they're killed on camera.

In one of the most memorably twisted scenes of all time, the students are shown an instructional video to prepare them for combat. The host gives exuberant, detailed descriptions covering all the ways they might get murdered. She tells them they will each be furnished with a weapon. Some people may get an axe, but others may get a pot lid. She gives cartoonish smiley faces and frowny faces to accent her sarcastically upbeat tone. Her words are horrifying and her demeanor perky. The children are in total shock and simply can't digest the irony. Meanwhile back in the real world, I couldn't stop laughing.

The movie is at the farthest ends of the spectrum when it comes to violence and humor. There are several times when I smirked or even yelled at my screen. "Why the hell can't you hit someone from 5 feet away with a damn machine gun?" was a frequent exclamation. I also smirked on the occasions that someone did get hit with a bullet, and another, and another, but barely slowed down. Movie characters are immortal until the writer says otherwise. It may seem crass, but when a character has a conversation with an arrow in their neck, should I not laugh? After one violent exchange a boy stands up with a hatchet buried in the top of his skull. Another boy says with complete sincerity, "Are you okay?" He then drops to the ground dead. When you don't think they can take it up another notch, a boy stuffs a grenade into the mouth of a disembodied head and tosses it through a window. To take such material seriously would be damaging to your mental health. Laughter is the universal medicine.

The drama doesn't suffer from the gratuitous violence. With over 40 children the film can't cover everybody's story. Instead, it focuses on a few key players in the battle. Our heroes are students Noriko Nakagawa and Shuya Nanahara. They lost a mutual friend due to the aforementioned exploding necklaces. The two of them pair up in hopes of finding a way to survive but have the poor luck to be supplied with a pot lid and some binoculars as their weapons. The two deadliest people on the island are Kazuo Kiriyama, a sociopathic volunteer, and Mitsuko Souma, a beautiful girl with a troubled past who has no trouble adjusting to a kill-or-be-killed environment. To the chagrin of our protagonists these killers are either supplied with weapons or steal them from the corpses they leave behind.

The overseer of this sick game is known as Kitano, the same 7th grade teacher they wronged 2 years ago. It's said that their class was chosen at random to participate in the Battle Royale, but Kitano seems a little too morbidly satisfied with the selection. He kills two students before the games even begin; one for arguing and the other for whispering. In fairness, he had already given one warning about the whispering. Kitano's motives become murkier as the film escalates to its climax. His facial expressions are indiscernible. Only his actions give us insight, but they become more curious with each scene. Revenge may not be the only thing fueling his madness. Kitano is a rare character who can embody evil and beg our sympathies in the same film.

This film has been getting some attention recently thanks to the success of "The Hunger Games". If you read a synopsis of the two films they appear similar. They're both about groups of kids being forced to fight to the death by a vengeful government. After seeing them both I can promise you they have very little in common. "The Hunger Games" is a dystopian version of the Roman Coliseum. The kids are forced to fight to lift the spirits of the rich while crushing the spirits of the poor. "Battle Royale" is different because there's no tradition. No one knew what was coming. The children aren't being televised and no one is being treated like a celebrity. They are abducted from a school bus and thrust into a violent situation. There's an added level of emotional investment in "Battle Royale" because the kids are all familiar to one another. They've spent years together as classmates and factions were formed long before combat was involved. "The Hunger Games" takes its killing far more serious than "Battle Royale". The characters we get to know must be wept over when they're vanquished. "Battle Royale" will gladly behead an innocent for the amusement of its audience and then never mention the character again.

For those who haven't experienced the violent side of Japanese action, this is a great place to start. It's incredibly brutal, but has characters that you can love or hate. "Battle Royale" is actually pretty tame when compared to other Asian blood feasts like "Ichi The Killer", "The Machine Girl", "Tokyo Gore Police" and the like. It also happens to be completely captivating from beginning to end. This film should satisfy all but the most squeamish of cinephiles.