Film: Battle Royale: Limited Edition
Release date: 13th December 2010
Certificate: 18
Running time: 109 mins
Director: Kinji Fukasaku
Starring: Takeshi Kitano, Chiaki Kuriyama, Tatsuya Fujiwara, Noriko Nakagawa, Tarô Yamamoto
Genre: Action/Horror/Thriller
Studio: Arrow
Format: DVD & Blu-ray
Country: Japan
Based on Koushun Takami’s 1999 manga, Battle Royale stunned and outraged the Japanese parliament upon its release in 2000. Ten years on, does it retain its impact?
Could you kill your best friend? That is the question posed to a horrified group of Japanese teenagers who, at the end of their compulsory education, find themselves abducted and taken to an abandoned school, where their former teacher Kitano (Takeshi Kitano) informs them that they have been entered into a deadly game - the Battle Royale - aimed at punishing unruly youths.
The rules of the game are simple: only one can survive. To do that, the ‘contestants’ must murder their rivals. If, after three days, there is no outright winner, then the explosive collars worn by all will explode, and everyone will be dead.
The film follows teenagers Shuya (Fujiwara) and Noriko (Maeda), as they try to stay alive, and figure out a way to do so without having to kill each other…
Too many movies are undeservedly labelled live action manga, but Battle Royale truly deserves the label. Not because its visual scope is overly wacky, or full of imagery one wouldn’t think possible with live action, but because of its boldness and energy. The viewer is thrust into the story with minimal set-up, the characters and dystopian-Japanese setting established with the broadest of strokes; the cinematography is stark, stripped down; and the performances (especially of the young cast) are big and loud. In all the right ways, Battle Royale is a manga come to life as invigorating cinema.
And as the game wears on, and the teenaged contestants enter into a thrilling and horrifying Big Brother meets Lord Of The Flies scenario, Fukasaku treats us to a series of increasingly intense set-pieces, all rooted in the central moral dilemma of what lengths the characters will go to in order to survive. Juxtaposed with rather bland flashback sequences to flesh out the characters, the survival story lacks a certain amount of tension (because we know, for at least the first hour, that certain characters are almost guaranteed to make it to the latter stages), but as the climax nears, and vulnerability increases, even a spacious cinema can feel like a prison cell for the viewer, such is Battle Royale’s sheer intensity.
A visual, visceral triumph, for sure, but not without its flaws. Any substance to the set-up is marginalised in favour of the arresting style. Quite what led to Japan being in the state that we find it in the opening act (explored in greater detail in the manga) is never full established, and, as such, there is very little to connect the viewer to characters - very little to demand sympathy beyond the recognition that the young people are in a horrible predicament. That the teens being generally identifiable movie archetypes suggest that this may be the point - a rush without emotional involvement, prompting guilt from the contemporary audience. Battle Royale certainly has a drum to bang about the demonising of youth - but it bangs that drum without any real rhythm or melody; its overall message unfortunately muddled. Scenes where characters gun down several others feel like simple stylised, exploitative, ‘cool’ violence - rather than the sort of profound, socio-political metaphor that the opening reel seems to promise.
But there’s no denying the effect of its stylistic choices. The intensity of the opening, as the ‘chosen’ children learn their predicament, and the bitter righteousness with which teacher Kitano establishes his dominance over them is instantly gripping, and visually horrifying. And as the game wears on, the viewer is held in rapt attention. But even such moments as these do not always enthral the viewer to the point of true emotional involvement and investment. It is established early on that that the emphasis is on a heightened, manga-like reality - with the teens in identical uniforms, forcibly sedated on a coach-trip and stalked by a power-suited lady in a gas mask, the viewer knows that Battle Royale exists within a slightly skewed, dystopian version of the real world. This endures throughout the film, and the effect is breathtakingly cinematic, but further undermines the raw power of any social comment Fukasaku seeks to make (of course, on this issue, the film certainly will play differently to international audiences after the fact than it does the contemporary local viewer).
As stated above, the performances - in keeping with the manga origins and stylised sensibility - are big, save for the standout supporting turn by Takeshi Kaneshiro, whose quiet rage and subtle insanity utterly sells the outrageous conceit. Those around him do a lot of wailing, shouting, panting and crying, and Kaneshiro - in a directorial choice perhaps designed to represent the brick wall off which youth angst and trouble so regularly bounces - presents a chillingly cold conviction. His role is small, his presence is big.
The younger actors don’t have much to do in the way of covering new thespian ground, but they fulfil archetypes well, and show the appropriate amount of fear as the battle royale goes on. Tatsuya Fujiwara, as Shuya, is the de facto hero, and he brings the right sort of earnestness and a quiet charisma to the role; Japanese popstar and actress Aki Maeda nicely shows Noriko’s early fear giving way to a wayward resilience at the demands and rigours of the experience; western viewers may recognise the actress Chiaki Kuriyama, in the role of Takako, her steely glare (which one may retrospectively term ‘Lisbeth-like’) almost identical to the one she employed in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 1.
But, though the cast do good work, none of them truly stand out, although that may be exactly the filmmakers’ point. Indeed, as the teens’ crushes and anxieties - pure adolescent fluff that would grace any ‘typical’ teen movie - come to the fore, intensified by the deadly context, one wonders if Fukasaku is intentionally presenting cliché - deliberately over-playing the yearnings and emotions we’ve seen in dozens of movies before. Is he offering some twisted form of optimism, saying that innocence, friendship and love are the best shields against a progressively more violent and oppressive world? Or is the director being more cynical, daring a viewer to ask themselves why they can feel for fictional youths while demonising the ones they interact with in reality? That there is evidence for both makes Battle Royale an endlessly fascinating picture, if not quite a true classic.
Battle Royale deserves every bit of its enduring cult success. Ten years on, it remains as shocking, powerful and twistedly exhilarating as it was upon release. Sensational. JN
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