Battle Royale (2000)

Plot Outline: At the dawn of the millennium, students are boycotting class and teachers have no control over their students anymore. Law and order is breaking down so the Japanese pass the Millennium Educational Reform Act (aka the Battle Royale Act) in which one randomly selected class are to be sent to a remote island policed by troops. Here they are given weapons and must face the ultimate dilemma - they must kill all of their friends within 3 days to survive because only one person is allowed off the island. If there are more survivors after the 3 days, everyone dies. They are fitted with collars that force them to participate or else they will be killed. Every six hours, "danger zones" are created on the island in which any student currently in that area will have their collars terminated.

The Review: The Japanese have been releasing a lot of f****d up stuff recently but perhaps none as great as Battle Royale. It's an extremely bleak and downright horrific vision of the future and starts off in perhaps one of the most ingenious opening thirty minutes ever. A group of 14 year old students are on a bus, thinking they're going on a school trip. But they are quickly drugged and smuggled to the island where they are told the rules. It's so frightening realistic and it moves so quickly that no one really has any time to grasp what is going on. You're just thrust into this nightmare scenario and it's absolutely horrific to watch, especially when you consider that these are only 14 year old characters with little experience of life. It's fascinating watching the breakdown of traditional school norms: the nerdy kids soon show their dark sides when given weapons of power, previously assumed "bullies" turn out to be incredibly wimpy, the token bitch in the class turns out to be as cold as you'd have thought and even the comedic duos are here turning on each other and snapping into a kill frenzy. And yes the film does get extremely violent and brutal as these kids pull out all of the stops to try and survive. It's heart-wrenching to actually see best friends turn on each other and poignant to see former enemies work together, despite the fact they know that one of them will have to die or else they both will. Unfortunately the class of 42 may have been a little too big because that means you've gotta sit and watch them all die. It gets repetitive pretty quickly as school kids chase each other around the island with weapons, turn on their friends, cry, turn psychotic, commit suicide and other nasty stuff. Repeated over and over again, the film could easily have been shortened down and the impact would still have been the same.

Final Verdict: As near to a modern day classic of Clockwork Orange-esque futuristic violence as you'll probably get, Battle Royale is full of satire, visual flair, lots of style, plenty of really shocking moments and of course, lots of violence. Highly recommended, even if you hate subtitles.

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