Disturbing Breakdown of Battle Royale(2000)
Synopsis
In the future, the Japanese government wants to control youth juvenile delinquency. They enact the BR ACT as a result.
The act chooses a class of students to participate in the Battle Royale act. At the beginning of the film, after briefly mentioning the BR ACT, the film flashes forward to the survivor and winner of the Battle Royale from Zentsuji Middle School Class E.
As the reporters report the scene, they witness the winner is a girl, this year’s winner of Battle Royale. Then the film flashes back to a recently orphaned student and his classmates.
One day the students are on a field trip.
Unbeknownst to them, they are chosen to participate in the newly formed act Battle Royale, and they have to fight until the very end until only one of them is left, and they are the winner.
Battle Royale, a future near you
What shocks many viewers is how realistic Battle Royale is, as it is more of a cautionary tale and a political satire.
This movie inspired a lot of Hollywood productions decades later, like The Hunt and Bacurau are making fun of their countries’ politics. Watching today’s news and rewatching this movie, the movie is even scarier as a result.
As young people are still not taken seriously. The government withholds information from them like Covid 19 as they did their best to conceal facts about whether Covid was ubiquitous amongst young adults.
In the end, the truth did catch up to them as it became more apparent that the hospital data showed a high percentage of Covid patients were young adults.
Also, as the country becomes more gerontocratic, will elders in the office create policies that can hurt modern-day youth?
Review
I was shocked when I first watched this movie, as most viewers were also. It kept me on the edge of my seat from the first scene until the end.
It is especially watching the first part to discover that I was tricked into thinking that the little girl was the actual winner of Battle Royale.
Believe it or not, the film closely resembles the Hunger Games. Both had controversies about the fact that kids had to fight to the death.
Battle Royale came out more than a decade before Hunger Games, but most likely, people watched the Hunger Games and heard about the similarities between the movies.
The most shocking factor is that Battle Royale seems more like a modern-day tale of youth’s protest through violence to get through to their senior counterparts that want to control them through their politics.
But what intrigues me the most about Battle Royale is the film.
Although it is violent, the story is more complex in that it overshadows the violence to the point that it makes it stand out as a cult classic that keeps people talking about it for years.
It is not an easy watch, but it fits better as a dark timing coming of age action film and executes these pressing themes better than most coming-of-age films.
I am giving this movie a rare five out of five stars
(Battle Royale is available to watch on Tubi for free)
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