Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale combines video-game-like cinematography with perception reminiscent of reality TV to create a truly disturbing film. The combination of these techniques creates a narrative that is profoundly fantastic yet compelling. It entertains while criticizing aspects of the entertainment system it portrays.
The story is post-apocalyptic but poignantly related to modern society. In the mid-21st century, Japanese students rebel against their teachers and stop going to class. In eventual response to this youthful anarchy, the government decides to take drastic and violent action. Each year, a class of ninth grade students is “elected” to take part in a battle royale, in which they are taken to a deserted island under the guise of a “field trip” and must kill each other until only one remains.
What follows is a lot of carnage and self-destruction reminiscent of the infighting and savagery of Lord of the Flies. We follow the protagonist, Tatsuya, who was initially guilty of stabbing his teacher in the leg and is thus causally linked to the creation of the battle royale. His struggle is both physical and spiritual, as he attempts to survive without succumbing to the dehumanization that his classmates go through in order to get off the island.
It was easy to be entertained and immersed by the narrative to an extent that the violence did not seem particularly striking. However, Fukasaku structures the film to reveal the artifice and ridiculousness of its compelling characters. He does this through highlighting the plasticity of the characters, making their motivations appear simplistic and clichéd and their character traits indistinctive. He even goes to the extent of allowing a character to be briefly reborn, highlighting the way in which video games are constructed with the consistent option of playing again — one can always be reborn.
While the film seems to invite criticism of the large amount of violence (especially violence committed by children to other children) as potentially dangerous to a youthful audience, its satirical content makes it a filmic masterpiece.
Battle Royale also embodies the alterations that film is undergoing, leading film theorists to hearken the death of cinema. The video game features and self-conscious construction point to the end (or at least decline) of traditional narrative structure as applied to film. While the impact of this philosophical end may not be felt in all its extremity for a few years, the existence of Battle Royale and similar films in Japan seems to foreshadow a potential similar development in American cinema. After all, the Japanese developed Nintendo, so their insights into the technological world of fantasy (often violent and overly-sexualized) seems a bit ahead of our own.
Even if Battle Royale signals the end of the cinema as we know it, the film has retained one dubious aspect of traditional film: the sequel. Battle Royale 2 is due to be released later this year.
The film will be shown at 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. Friday night, West Lecture Hall in the Science Center.