In the face of widespread social unrest (especially from the student population) Japan passes the B.R. Act. This new law dictates that once each year, one randomly selected class of students will participate in a Battle Royale: a free-for-all fight to the death from which only a sole survivor will walk away from. This year's participants, class 3-B, are fitted with electronic collars that will explode if there is no victor after three days. Now, armed with randomly distributed weapons (ranging from paper fans to machine guns), it's every boy, girl and clique for themselves.
Battle Royale is both strongly and immediately comparable to The Hunger Games. The premises of each are identical: a dystopic government, fearful of social uprising, abducts children and forces them to fight each other to the death as a means of terroristic control. Both competitions are controlled by a centralized "game maker" who uses a variety of strong-arm tactics to funnel participants toward one another (ranging from The Hunger Games' traps / mechanized weaponry to Battle Royale's explosive collar and "danger zones"). Both include "career tributes" that have an unfair advantages in training and experience. Both present alarming disadvantages in terms of the equipment distributed among the participants. Both see the creation and dissolution of alliances as a means of survival. Hell, even both sets of protagonists are romantically involved with one another.
The differences between the films, however, are infinitely more profound. The Hunger Games functions primarily as a political allegory. It emphasizes the brutality of Snow's regime and the harsh inequities between The Capital and The Districts. It focuses on The Games as a means of control and, subsequently, the intensity of the unfolding action within them. At its core, The Hunger Games is an action movie centered around combat and survival: "blut und ehre."
Battle Royale, however, is a surreal portrait of Kafkan intensity. Director Kinji Fukasaku does not invest the film in the politics of the Republic of Greater East Asia or its subsidiary of Japan any more than is absolutely necessary to provide context for the battle royale itself. The closest explanation for this free-for-all comes in the form a disarmingly cheerful orientation video, which is itself cut short when "game maker" / teacher Kitano (Takeshi Kitano) impales a girl with a knife for whispering to another girl during their orientation (every teacher's fantasy). We (along with class 3-B) are then thrust into hypnagogic pandemonium before the implications of "why" of the situation can sink in.
Near the end of the film, Kitano resumes his role as the chief agent of surrealism when he reveals a picture that he painted over the past three days. Rendered in the simplistic style of a child's watercolor, it shows how every student in class 3-B died during the past three days. It depicts children pin-cushioned by arrows, run through by swords, impaled by hatchets, leaping off of cliffs and having their heads explode, all sprayed with bright, cartoonish blood. In the center is Noriko (Aki Maeda), untouched by the carnage, smiling serenely and haloed in light: the only student that he wanted to win the competition. After being shot (and seemingly killed), he gets up and casually answers his ringing cell phone, carries on a brief conversation and shoots his phone in frustration before slumping over dead.
While the tributes' confrontations in The Hunger Games emphasized actual combat skill, Battle Royale's deaths are rarely the result of the students' fighting prowess. When Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) kills Glimmer (Leven Rambin) or Marvel (Jack Quaid) kills Rue (Amandla Stenberg), it is because they either outsmarted or overpowered them. In Battle Royale, however, it is based on a factor that none of them had any control over: their randomly selected "weapons." Yukiko (Yukari Kanasawa) and Yumiko (Misao Kato) are murdered by Kazuo (Masanobu Ando) when they attempt to use their "weapon," a megaphone, to get people to stop fighting one another. Likewise, Hiroki (Sosuke Takaoka) is killed by Kayoko (Takayo Mimura) when he uses his weapon, a tracking device for each student's collar, to find her so that he could confess that he liked her. Except for Kazuo replacing his paper fan for a stockpile of guns and grenades, the deaths predictably play out based the fatalistic distribution of weapons.
In perhaps the most memorable scene of the film, Shuya (Tatsuya Fujiwara) is rescued and nursed back to health by a group of girls. One of the girls, Yuko (Hitomi Hyuga), witnessed him accidentally kill fellow classmate Oki (Gouki Nishimura) and poisons his food. Another girl, Yuka (Satomi Hanamura), grabs the food and eats it, subsequently dying after vomiting up blood like one of Danny Boyle's Infected. The group of girls devolve into accusations of foul play, resulting in a massacre that leaves only Yuko alive (which she corrects by committing suicide after freeing Shuya).
The entire scene plays out with the brilliant senselessness an old episode of The Twilight Zone, where social order breaks down over veritable non-issues. Having secured a safe base of operations, this close-knit group of friends had managed to not only survive the carnage thus far, but were planning on meeting up with another group of students to escape from the island on which they were being confined. But because Yuko blamed Shuya for Oki's death (when, in fact, Oki brained himself with his own hatchet after falling down a hill while attacking Shuya), she committed one small act of vengeance in poisoning his food. In a bout of fatalistic irony, her attempt to preserve their social order (by saving them all from the "murderous" Shuya) snowballed into killing every last one of them after fear and suspicion turned them on one another.
With The Hunger Games as an immediate comparison, it is easy to mistake Battle Royale as an inferior film. There is less build-up to the titular bloodbath, less character development and an unwieldily cast of characters (42, compared to 24) that we cannot possibly begin to grow attached to. When Rue dies, it is heart wrenching; by watching her shadow Katniss, help her escape from the careers, nurse her back to health and then share intimate details of her life in District 11, we grew as attached to her as Katniss had. By comparison, when Kazuhiko (Yasuomi Sano) and Sakura (Tomomi Shimaki) commit suicide at the outset of the battle royale, all that we know about them is that they are boy #21 and Girl #4.
Despite being most of the cast's first or only film, Battle Royale features an exceptionally good cast, perhaps assisted somewhat by the fact that so few of them had a significant amount of screen time. Both Masanobu Ando and Yousuke Shibata fully immerse themselves into their characters, conveying the psychotic and chilling nuances of Kazuo and Mitsuri. Takeshi Kitano provides a straight-faced juxtaposition to the unfolding chaos of the film, able to deftly switch between the romantic longing, murderous rage and droll lecturing of Kitano.
Battle Royale is the other half of The Hunger Games coin: existential and absurd. It plunges into its subject matter with nihlistic glee and never slacking its pace to allow our sensibilities to catch up with our senses. It is as entertaining as The Hunger Games and twice as wicked. Becky and I both rate this film an 8, putting it on par with American Psycho, Fearless and Kwaidan.
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