The irrepressible Jason Adams lent me a couple of horror movies to do his part for the horrorthon this month, bless ‘im. (I reciprocated by lending him The Books of Blood and The Wicker Man.) I watched the first of these today: Battle Royale, the supercontroversial dystopian-Japanese kids-killing-kids flick that also exists as a novel and a well-regarded manga. And for the second time this week, I was… underwhelmed.
The plot is pretty simple. In a future, militarized Japan, the government has responded to economic catastrophe by passing the Battle Royale Act. A class of 7th (or 9th–the film’s not very clear) graders is selected at random to take part in three days of mortal combat, wherein they’re isolated in a remote location and forced to kill each other with weapons given to them by the B.R. program. The kids have three days to slaughter each other until only one remains, or all the survivors will be killed by unremovable remote-detonated explosive necklaces. The film (and the manga, and presumably the book) is a study of how the different kids react to the pressure to kill their friends in order to survive themselves. It’s basically a high-concept Lord of the Flies.
I’ve been reading the manga version of the story, and it’s been entertaining thus far. The main characters are interesting and likeable, the shock moments work well, and the violence is spectacularly over the top. But a lot of what worked due to the methodical, make-every-moment-count nature of Japanese comic storytelling is rushed in the film, keeping the viewer less invested in pulling for the heroic characters and unable to see the more bloodthirsty ones as anything but one-dimensional killing machines. Indeed, the filmmakers seem to have taken for granted the fact that viewers would be familiar with either the novel or manga versions of the story: It could be that the dialogue and expository captions were just inadequately translated, but it seemed that no one ever bothered to explain why a pretty massive amount of plot points were happening. For example, the sinister emcee-type character from the manga (the same type of part that Richard Dawson played in The Running Man) is transformed here into a former teacher of the class in question, who had been stabbed (why? we never find out) by one of the goofier kids (why? it seems totally out of character), then quits teaching only to wreak vengeance on the class by forcing them into the game (why? is he now a government official? the soldiers involved in the B.R. program seem to answer directly to him, but he’s still pointedly presented as a lonely, pathetic, working-class schlub). Moreover, we never find out what the purpose of the game itself is–there are some intimations about this being a response to truancy, but a) that’s kind of a harsh punishment for cutting gym class, no? and b) wouldn’t this make kids LESS likely to stay in school, knowing their class could be next into the meat grinder? Indeed, a lot of summaries of the various Battle Royale incarnations say the kids kill each other on a television show, but no mention of a TV show is made in the movie version, and no cameras or viewers are present in any version, including the movie and the manga. And let’s not even talk about the nonsensical ending, which has two plot holes (at least) big enough to drive a Toyota through and culminates in a completely unnecessary three-part reprise of dream sequences and flashbacks we’ve already seen.
The film doesn’t even have a satisfyingly dark tone to compensate for the faulty plot mechanics. I was expecting a Texas Chain Saw-style parable of a country that’s eating its youth, but instead I got a slick, Hollywood-style action thriller–you know, the kind where virtually everyone survives just long enough after getting shot to say something profoundly ironic or ironically profound, and where there’s big swelling orchestral music at all the exciting or touching parts. I guess we’re supposed to be disturbed because it’s kids killing each other, and not grown-up movie stars, but everything else is so similar to a Michael Bay movie that I barely noticed the age of the killers after a while. And even the gore, which in the manga is just splendidly extravagant, is nothing compared to the average action movie, and certainly pales in comparison to, say, the final half-hour of Dawn of the Dead. As horrific as the story is, I never found myself horrified.
The only thing that came close was the (unintentionally?) engimatic Mr. Kitana, the ex-teacher who was calling the shots in the slaughter of his former students. I got the sense that the filmmakers were trying to say something about the adult world’s simultaneous disgust, distrust, and envy of teenagers (as filtered in particular through the strange schoolgirl obsession featured in so much Japanese pop entertainment), or even more specifically the occasional journey of teachers from wide-eyed idealism to sadistic misanthropy. But either through lackadaisacal structuring or simply a lack of ideas, none of these possibilities emerges clearly, or even in a murkily compelling fashion. Whatever the reason, I ended up feeling that Battle Royale, the movie, was a gauntlet I’d rather not have run.
(Still and all, the manga is good, and if I can get over having the ending and all the twists spoiled for me by the movie, I’ll continue to read it. Meanwhile, Jason lent me another movie, Paperhouse, which he discusses here. B.R. aside, his taste is usually impeccable, and it’s been seconded for me by Bruce Baugh. The thrill of discovery and all that… Speaking of which, I’ve got my own relatively obscure horror movies to proselytize for. They’re on the way, I promise.)