I am a huge fan of the Japanese movie Battle Royale. It’s never been released in America and likely never will be. We’d find it too controversial and unsettling. The studio that made it won’t even talk with distributors. You can only get the British release of the Korean two-disc special set in America.

What’s the fuss about?

The film opens with some exposition about how, “in the near future,” the Japanese economy collapsed and kids lost hope in the future and their parents’ generation. Kids began to “boycott” school by the hundreds of thousands, and those who bothered to go were disrespectful and violent, making schools a dangerous place. The “Battle Royale Act” was passed by the Parliament in response.

Every year, the worst ninth-grade classes in the country were nominated by their teachers. A lottery was held and the “winner” was sent to an isolated island that had only the ruins of an abandoned small town, for the Battle Royale. Only one student would be allowed to leave the island alive.

The film cuts to a crush of reporters swarming around a military jeep inching its way along a jungle path, surrounded by soldiers. We see a small girl with her head bowed in the passenger seat. The reporters are trying to get a shot of her, talking about “this year’s winner” in the Battle Royale (BR for short). The girl looks up. Her face is covered in blood, as is her nightgown and the small doll she holds. Her expression is breath-taking, a shocking mix of glee, pride and malevolence, the kind of expression I’m sure no parent ever wants to see on their child, it is so horrifying. It’s a viscerally disturbing image, almost iconic.

That’s the first five minutes. After twenty minutes, we’ve met the latest class of BR (Battle Royale) and watched them deal with their horrifying and incomprehensible new situation. The rest of the film is watching the kids try to survive.

How can this be entertainment? Because the theme is one that’s crucial in modern Japan: the parental generation has failed in their duty to their children. Instead, they find themselves increasingly abandoned to grow up on their own, or exploited by adults for cruel amusement. For example, high school prostitution is a going concern. There is a “pop idol” who has F-cup breasts and is a sensation; she’s 11 years old.

Japan’s equivalent of the baby boomer generation has watched their society collapse. They’re angry and turn it against their children. That’s the basis of the movie’s theme.

What makes it work is that the kids in the film are real kids who act their age. They aren’t the Hollywood-style twenty-somethings playing over-mature kids, or the sitcom staple of the sassy, too-smart child-adult. They look and behave like children. And they’ve been tossed into Hell. Think of a cross between Lord of the Flies and The Most Dangerous Game.

The review is 4000 words long, so I won’t post the whole thing here. You’re welcome! You can click on this link to read it. I cannot recommend this movie highly enough to folks who think they can stomach the idea. It’s not nearly as violent or gory as any American R-rated movie, just shocking. Over in East Tennessee, you may have to do some looking to locate it.

But it’s worth the hunt. You’ll find yourself turning scenes from the film, and its themes, over and over in your mind for days. You’ll look at the kids around you a little differently, a lot more sympathetically. You’ll wonder what kind of future we’re creating and handing down.

Posted in uncategorized on June 3rd, 2005 by HalfBakered | RSS 2.0 |