Saw
Battle Royale yesterday.
I have a huge soft spot for Japanese popular culture. Having been exposed to video games, manga, anime, and live-action films from Japan for most of my adulthood, I'm probably more inclined towards liking - and understanding - something like
Battle Royale than your average Joe or Jane. But still, despite having read reviews and despite being prepared for the experience, on some level I'm completely lost for words. I think I "got" the movie. It made sense to me, in a twisted and frightening manner. I certainly enjoyed it, although that's a somewhat guilty admission, since the movie is filled with such over-the-top violence and a nihilism you rarely see in an American or European movie. No one would ever get away with making something like this in Hollywood, that's for sure. It'd be blamed for every single violent incident in schools from now until the end of the century.
Battle Royale is the story of a very near future Japan where - lottery-style - a high-school class is selected to participate in something called a "battle royale": In essence, to take part in a fight to the death where there's only one survivor. Kill or be killed. Whether the point of this program - named the BR-reform - is to cull the population, punish teenagers for delinquincy and lack of respect for adult authority, or some other, more culturally obscure, reason, I really couldn't tell you. The opening credits claim that students have become rebellious and out of control, and an early scene shows a student randomly stabbing a teacher. But that's really a moot point. It's the framework, but after about ten minutes you stop caring about
why this is happening, only that it
is happening. In pure video-game style, the focus is on death and on survival. Every time someone's killed, an on-screen counter tells us who died and how many are left. 42 start out. Even before the game begins, there's just 40 left. And there's only supposed to be one left by the end of the game (and the movie)...or everyone dies.
Battle Royale is brutal but hilarious - hopefully by design. It's sometimes hard to tell, especially when teenage romantics, broadly drawn, mix with gallons of blood and automatic gunfire. Half the time, the movie's preoccupied with who's got a crush on whom, and with the obviously doomed relationships between the 16-year old boys and girls. A few couples (and here be spoilers, so beware!) take the easy way out, and commit suicide rather than be forced to kill each other. Another student has returned from a previous battle royale only because he wants to understand why his girlfriend smiled and said "thank you" when he killed her. It's sweet and absolutely horrifying at the same time. At certain points in the movie, the characters' inner thoughts are presented in text, white on black, like lyrical interludes - it's like playing a Japanese role-playing game like
Final Fantasy, where simplistic emotions writ large and combat with demonic monsters go hand in hand without a stutter. It's fascinating on a cultural level, but it can also be somewhat inexplicable - like you're offered a peek into a completely alien culture. But it's an alien culture that I - and a lot of people - recognise and am familiar with...even
understand, to a worrying degree. I do pity, however, the person who walks into this with no familiarity of Japanese popular culture whatsoever. He or she will enter a nightmarish world of blood, theatrical overacting, and high-school sexuality, with seemingly no connection to European or American conventions. Yet, it's exactly those modern conventions the movie appears to be inspired by; the shroud of violence that has begun to hang over - particularly US - high-schools, where teachers and students walk in fear of their fellow students and the threat of explosive violence. This is a Japanese extension of two Western phenomena - teenage violence and reality-TV - but with a uniquely nihilistic presentation, something that's very culturally specific, and which makes this movie more than a speculative bloodbath. Although it is that, too.
Don't see
Battle Royale if you're easily offended, if you can't - or don't want to - watch cartoonish violence, and if the idea of high-school kids blowing each other away with automatic rifles, hand-guns, grenades, swords, knives, and axes disturbs you. Do see it if you're up for a dose of stylised Japanese video-game action, with a smidgen of social commentary, wrapped in a lot of pointed, absurdist comedy about angst-ridden 16-year olds. Just don't expect to walk away from this like you would a typical summer blockbuster. It will affect you. It will (hopefully) disturb and disgust you. And it will stay with you for a very long time...if only because it's so completely and utterly different.
