Delayed Reaction: Battle Royale

Premise: A group of children are put on an island to kill each other until there is only one left.

 

Can a dystopic competition ever just work? There are a lot of movies with a premise where a character gets put into a game (often deadly) that has been going on for a while and they are the one to finally break it. The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, Escape Room. They’re all about the people who end the game. Why can’t it ever be about the thing working as intended? Don’t tell me it wouldn’t be compelling. These competitions are always designed as something that an entire population finds compelling year after year. The Hunger Games ratings are huge. Anything where there is only one winner is naturally captivating. I don’t watch a baseball movie to see Kevin Costner introduce a bat that never misses. I watch it to see him hit a home run to win the game. It’s gotten to the point where the only surprise move left in these movies is to see it all go according to plan.

 

Take Battle Royale for example. Being a 2001 movie, it did technically predate a lot of the movies I’m calling out, but it wasn’t the beginner of this trend. I watched Battle Royale, and I was already doing the math of which characters we unkillable. It never occurred to me that I’d be watching a movie where 3 characters I liked would have to fight to the death to survive. I assumed they would survive, which negates all the tension on the movie. There are plenty of other movies out there with only one survivor. There’s literally a movie called Lone Survivor. Or Free Fire ends with only one survivor, and that is a case where everyone is killing everyone else. You can do it. Presumably, the Battle Royale competition is well put together. People have tried to break the game before. Every competition has a clever person that figures something out but they still all end with the one survivor. If I don’t have any evidence that these characters are outlier special or lucky, then why should I expect them to do what no one else has done before?

 

Other than my demented “the bad guys should’ve won” take, I liked a lot about Battle Royale. With so many characters to follow and kill, there’s a lot of variation throughout the movie. It’s almost like watching a couple dozen related short films. For some reason I expected the violence to be much worse. I’d been holding off on seeing this for a while because if the violence gets too real, I’m not a fan. Yes, Battle Royale is violent and the violence is against children, but the killings weren’t Saw or Saving Private Ryan-level vivid and unsettling. So it was a much easier watch than I expected. It sands off fewer edged than The Hunger Games, which I appreciated, but it still does some sanding.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend