t is near-future Japan, in a time of great economic catastrophe. With the unemployment rate approaching 15 percent, millions are out of work and society is fraying at the edges. The nation's schoolchildren have even united in a strike, boycotting school and its useless training for life in a society that no longer seems to have a future.
The government responds the way desperate governments have always responded: by creating a scapegoat. Blaming the nation's youth for the chaos the adult administration has created, they pass the Battle Royale Law: a punitive measure which once every year forces a random ninth-grade class to fight to the death.
The 42 ninth graders thought they were going on a class trip. Instead, they're gassed, brought unconscious to a remote island, and fitted with explosive collars. As they awake, their past teacher, Mr. Kitano, appears at the head of a troop of soldiers, executes two of the kids just to get the attention of the rest, and explains the rules with the help of a grotesquely cheery instructional film. They will each be issued one weapon, ranging from the useless to the deadly; i.e., anything from a pot lid to a megaphone to a machine gun. They will then be set free, on the mountainous, forested island, to kill each other until only one survivor remains. They don't have to fight if their hearts aren't in it, but if there's more than one survivor in three days, then all the collars will detonate at once, killing everybody so nobody gets to go home.
The kids react with horror, but Kitano has no sympathy. He tells them it's what they deserve. He assures them that their generation is the entire reason for all the country's troubles.
Kitano releases the ninth-graders into the deserted landscape and watches the ensuing carnage with eerie dispassion. The first victim falls within minutes. One-quarter of the class is dead by the end of the first night. As the resentments and power struggles that plague any adolescent environment are magnified into desperate battles for survival, Kitano taunts the scattered combatants through loudspeakers, praising them for their participation and supplying them with regular updates of the fallen among their erstwhile friends.
A parable of courage in the face of savagery
There's no getting away from it. The Japanese war-metaphor Battle Royale, an Asian analogue to William Golding's Lord of the Flies, is a violent and bloody and consistently upsetting film, determined to avoid the facile action-movie conventions that would allow us to overlook, or even laugh at, the deaths of subsidiary characters. The 42 doomed students aren't all known to us. Some die right away, some die off-screen and some only survive long enough to establish the ruthlessness of others who strike first—but their situation remains horrific and is never once minimized for the sake of an easy thrill or cheap gag. We are never allowed to forget that these are just adolescents, achingly vulnerable to fear, naivete, young love, old resentments, self-doubt and the dawning awareness that this brutal game they never asked to play makes no special allowances for what's fair and who deserves to live.
In the wake of the Columbine massacre and the other notorious school killings that plagued the United States in the past few years, it's easy to see why the film has yet to receive even an art-house release domestically. Too many kids would get off on just the blood and guts. Too many adults would say that the film just encourages such savagery. Both have a case. Certainly there's an effective horror-movie frisson that resonates from the chilling smile of the murderous cheerleader-type Mitsuko, or the even higher body counts achieved by the ruthless punk Kiriyama (a past winner who looks a little like the young Bob Dylan, and who volunteered to play again because he considered it fun).
But it can also be argued that the film's real focus, amid all its tremendous horror, lies with the kids who retain their humanity by refusing to descend to the level the game demands of them. There's a throwaway bit, in the orientation scene, about one girl, tossed the pack containing her weapon, who hurls it back at the teacher and defiantly goes off to the killing zone unarmed. There's another scene involving a gentle couple who tearfully leap into the sea rather than participate. There's one bunch of kids led by the computer-geek Mimura who hole up in an abandoned building, hatching a plan to take the fight to their real tormentors; there's an idealistic kid named Sugimura who shows bravery in the defense of his friends and compassion in the face of death; there's another couple named Shuya and Noriko who support each other and never waver from that ideal. Shuya, in particular, is a sweet kid, horrified at the carnage and determined to find an alternative. Goodness every bit as mysterious as evil remains abundant throughout. The film owes much of its considerable power to the fact that, for the majority of these trapped children, nobility and courage and the will to live are no more effective at assuring survival than the contrasting sociopathic determination to survive at all costs. Death comes without warning, it comes without fairness, it comes in great numbers, it comes from fleeting and avoidable misunderstandings and it comes at the hands of their classmates and dearest friends.
Does anybody survive? Does nobility ultimately win out? That would be telling. But the film is definitely driven by character, with Kawada, Shuya, Noriko, Kiriyama, Mimura and Mitsuko prominent among the viewpoint characters. Even their monstrous ex-teacher, Kitano (played, oddly enough, by an actor named Kitano), is far from the two-dimensional villain he could have been. Driven by bitterness and self-loathing, as engaged in punishing himself as he is in punishing the children, he turns out to be more complicated and conflicted than he seems. And as much as we want him punished for what he's done, his last moment in the film is not just chilling and surreal ... but perversely sad.
The film is based on a science-fiction novel that takes place on an alternate world where Japan was victorious in World War II. Although that element didn't make it into the film, its director, Kinji Fukasaku, was himself in ninth grade at the time of the war, and vividly remembers the day his class was assigned to bury bodies. This isn't an exploitation film, by any means. It is personal and it is passionate.
