Back in the late 90s and early 2000s there was something of a vogue for what got called ‘extreme’ Japanese and Asian cinema with the likes of Ringu, Ichi The Killer and Oldboy getting relatively mainstream releases but, particularly for high school students and those of a similar age, one seemed to stand out, Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale.
I’ve seen the film a number of times and in a number of cuts over the years so I’ve lost track of exactly which but in this case I’m looking at the Arrow Video Director’s Cut released from 2014.
After an announcement about the rating of the film and discretion being advised a blast of classical music drops us into the story as we get an almost Star Wars like ‘opening crawl’, setting the dystopian scene and explaining just what the Battle Royale of the title is, before we meet the high school class unknowingly chosen to take part.
From there the first half of the film really is a chaotic ride of brutal death and I have to say that, in a few cases at least, these are more graphic and shocking than I’d remembered, but are used to crank up the tension excellently really helping to build an atmosphere of confusion and paranoia in just the right way.
It would be very easy for this to all feel very one dimensional but through it is a feeling that, at least within itself, the genuinely extreme level of violence is used to tell the story.
With the number of characters thinned somewhat the second half does find time to go into a little more character development and, while some is a little too light weight, for the main trio of Shuya (Tatsuya Fujiwara), Noriko (Aki Maeda) and Kawada (Tarō Yamamoto) I genuinely did feel I became invested in their plight and their mission to try and escape the seemingly inescapable.
What sets the film apart from many that have come since and some others it was lumped in is something in the visual and directorial style.
By the time it came to making Battle Royale in 1999, Fukasaku had been making films for the better part of forty years and it shows as there are clear images and techniques here that hark back to earlier styles of cinema giving it a feel of weight and gravitas often lost when things head in a more out right exploitation direction.
This is particularly evident when we get the wider, more panoramic and landscape shots which really base the film in a reality and keep the pacing level where it could otherwise easily have become over rushed.
Along with that is a streak of exceptionally dark humour that I found more pronounced on this viewing as I approached it less from the exploitation angle than when I’ve watched in the past.
The final climax does, I’ll admit, take a few watches to get your head around as dream sequences and a few other more abstract moments occur that distract from the overall feel, but ultimately the film is a great ride of a movie that, while brutal and extreme, uses this in a similar way to how Tarantino does to develop and move the film along rather than just purely for gratuitous shocks and it’s point about fighting against a broken system is one that can be read a few ways and still feels as relevant now as it did twenty years ago.
Tommy Girard 