After the Japanese unemployment rate reached 15%, teenagers massively turned to crime and violence, so the government passed the strict Battle Royale Act, in order to discipline juvenile delinquency: 42 high school students are abducted in a bus, placed with electric collars, given such weapons as guns and knives; and ordered by teacher Kitano to fight and kill each other on an uninhabited island, until only one teenager is left alive. Scores accept the task and murder each other, while the two friends Shuya and Noriko are the only ones refusing to fight, teaming up with Kawada, a guy who survived the last Battle Royale. The three are the last survivors and fake they shot each other since they know of microphones on their collars. When the soldiers go to find their bodies, the three confront and kill Kitano. Kawada dies, but Shuya and Noriko escape on a boat and hide as fugitives in Tokyo.
The director Kinji Fukasaku’s final film also became his most famous one, "Battle Royale", a bizarre forerunner to "The Hunger Games" and a more darker restructuring of "Assassination Classroom", which depicts a murder tournament of teenagers presented as a harsh lesson on growing up. Today, naturally, with less and less children being born in modern Japan, nobody would ever dream of harming the scarce youth anymore. Several themes emerge from this allegorical storyline: integrity, presented through the teenagers Shuya and Noriko who try to resist the order to kill their classmates, since she even throws the backpack with weapons into the sea; true nature through the observation that during the crisis times people show their true faces and dissolve their facade; anguished adolescents in fear of finding their place in the world of scarcity (the new, young generation has to leave their carefree childhood behind and learn how to fight each other - for the few remaining jobs, for instance); and political messages about how the governments resort to extremism to maintain their authority over civil unrest during crisis times. The movie has some grandiose moments of style which give it momentum: for instance, after each murder, subtitles inform about the name of the deceased and the number of players still alive (“Boy, Kuninobu- dead. 40 to go.”).
Some are also presented in a refreshingly playful manner (the video in which a cute woman explains the rules of Battle Royale to the teenagers who will fight on the island; two girls on the hill, one waiving a drape while the other speaks over the loudspeaker, and then they change and the other one waives while the first one talks). Anyone wondering why Tarantino picked actress Chiaki Kuriyama for his film “Kill Bill Vol. 1” will understand when seeing her deliver a graceful swang song performance here, in an episode of unexpected humanity: her character Chigusa is seen in a flashback, jogging on the street with yellow exercise clothes, while a guy she has a crush on is driving on a bicycle behind her, and she turns right, whereupon the film delivers an elegant transition cut to Chigusa jogging in a different scene, in the same yellow clothes, but just with an electric collar on her neck, to show that she is back in the dark present. Luckily, “Royale” refuses to sink into splatter violence or sadism, except maybe in the scene where a decapitated head with a granade in its mouth is thrown through the window, and thus most of the action seems almost like cartoon violence. Unfortunately, the 42 teenage characters just come and go, barely having more than 3 minutes of time to do anything before they get killed, which makes them one-dimensional, whereas the ending is anticlimactic and simply no good, because it lacks a point of a conclusion. Let’s be honest, a part of the concept is obviously just of exploitative nature, trying to draw attention through (teenage) violence, but it is still interesting how well made it is at times, nonetheless.
Grade:++
No comments:
Post a Comment