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Battle Royale Customer Reviews (1 - 3 of 27 Reviews)
A great movie for anyone........over 13.
Japan's economy has fallen. Students are boycotting school. Unemployment rate is at 15%. What does the government decide to do? Pass the Battle Royale Act.
Abnormal plot for a movie you're thinking. It is, but still a great movie. The BR(battle royale) act is simple.you gotta kill all your classmates till only one lives.you are given a bag of food , water, and a random weapon. some ppl get lucky and get a gun, and some get a potlid. lol
A random class is chosen for this act each yr. this yrs is just anotehr class. but every character has a simple background that is built as long as they live.
everyone is different with their ideas. some want to stop this act of horror with peace. others just accept what they have to do. but in the end, love is everyones strongest motivation.you wont be disappointed by this movie. but remember suspension of reality!
Violent social commentary
In near-future Japan, a law has been passed which requires that a class be randomly selected, fitted with explosive collars to ensure compliance, and released on an island with instructions to battle to the death. Some become killers very quickly and easily, while others resist succumbing. This very dark comedy follows the experience of one class and the students who beat the system.
Director Kinji Fukasaku, who was in his seventies when he made the film, juxtaposed the uniquely Japanese cliches of "pure" youth and chirpy cuteness with brutal ultraviolence to comment on a society in which the generation gap has reached an apocalyptic level: this is a world where the older generation's feelings of resentment, shame, and guilt toward the younger results in a hatred and fear of its own children. This film's satiric intent is underscored by the irrationality of the so-called "BK law" itself; it is never explained how forcing one group of students to kill each other each year is supposed to benefit society.
A very interesting extrapolation of current trends in Japanese society.
Bloodthirsty, brash, deeply disturbing---and Fun!
Bloody! Riveting! Complete carnage! Mindless violence!
Absolute fun, in other words, and honestly you should stop reading this review RIGHT NOW and go watch it.
"Battle Royale" is a movie about a particularly close Japanese high school class forced by law to travel to a deserted island and engage in the "Battle Royale", which means they don weapons, head out in the woods, and fight to the death. They're free to go at it individually with knives, chainsaws, spearguns, machine guns, and hatchets, or they can form little teams, but fight they must, and by the end of the game only one can survive.
What happens if they don't cooperate, or if more than one survives by game's end?
I knew you were gonna ask that. It's simple: the government has fitted the students with exploding neck collars, so if they do anything the game controllers don't like---like, oh, smarting off against the instructors, or ending up in the wrong island zone at the wrong time, or ending the game with more than one student left alive---then their little collar explodes.
"Battle Royale" is easily one of my favorite movies ever, made in the wonderful place that is modern-day Japan, which has become Ground Zero for stellar modern horror. I suspect that this affinity for the darkest aspects of human nature may have roots in Japan's experience in the final days of World War II: after all, there's nothing like having your cities literally obliterated to awaken you to the realization that there are scarier things afoot in the world than mummies, werewolves, and serial killers in hockey masks.
At any rate, Kinji Fukasaku draws on that deep wellspring of horror to create something of a modern masterpiece and a very shocking film, indeed. "Battle Royale" is set in Japan in the near future, in a society which is on the brink of chaos. Youth gang violence is at a high, and students come to school only when they feel like it; as a means of preventing complete anarchy, the government passes the "Battle Royale" law. Every year a high school class, selected by lottery, is dispatched to an abandoned island, fitted with explosive collars, supplied with all manner of weapons, and sent to battle it out to last.
Fukasaku said that "Battle Royale" was inspired by his own experiences as a teenager working at an Imperial munitions plant in the final days of WWII; after a particularly deadly bombing raid, he says that he and his young co-workers survived by hiding beneath the charred bodies of the dead.
According to the director, he emerged with "an irrational hatred for the unseen forces that drove us into those circumstances, a poisonous hostility towards adults, and a gentle sentimentality for my friends", and that attitude is evident in "Battle Royale". Make no mistake about it, the movie is a shocker, particularly in the way the once close-knit high school class self-segregates into killers and victims.
But at the heart of the film is the bond between the protagonist and his high school sweetheart. The problem, of course, is that only one can survive. While some have blasted the movie for what seems like a saccharine romance between the two (illustrated through flashbacks), in light of what happens it only makes "Battle Royale" far more twisted.
"Battle Royale" has been alternately praised and pilloried for its violence, but to my jaded tastes it's not that much worse than standard American action-movie fare. What makes the film so stunning is that you see adorable little innocent-faced Japanese schoolchildren, in their school uniforms, stalking their former friends through the jungle with hacksaws, pots and pans, uzis, and steak knives.
The acting is actually quite good, given how young most of the cast is, and Japanese movie-star "Beat" Takeshi is actually quite good as the game's controller. I suppose it reflects poorly on me that I find "Battle Royale" hysterical, but it's one of those films that is just so disturbinly over the top that it's funny.
And really, the film also contains a silver lining: yeah, high school may have been bad, but hey--- "Battle Royale" proves it could have been *much* worse.
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