This has to be one of the most eagerly awaited Japanese films of recent years, and has been at the top of the ‘most wanted’ lists of Japanese film enthusiasts for several months. This status has been aided by the near impossibility of actually getting hold of a copy until very recently, when both a subtitled VCD and a subtitled bootleg finally became available. The version under review is the bootleg, which is a time-coded screener, in widescreen (somewhere between 1.75:1 and 1.85:1) and with well-translated subtitles.

The film starts with some apocalyptic statistics about Japan at the dawn of the new Millennium – rising unemployment, economic turmoil and the younger generation running out of control. Next we see a TV reporter making her way through a crowd of people. She is talking about a competition and its winner, who is a girl. We see this young girl, surrounded by military personnel, her face covered in blood, smiling and clutching a bloodied teddybear… The girl is a winner of ‘Battle Royale’, a contest held on a deserted island in which a group of schoolchildren must kill each other, until only one remains and is declared winner. Next we meet Nanahara (played by Tatsuya Fujiwara, the star of various Japanese TV shows), who is known as ‘Shuya’ by his close friends. Shuya’s Dad committed suicide and he was then brought up in an orphanage with his best friend, Nobu. The two attended school together, in the same class, but Nobu went off the rails and stopped coming to school. A girl who he has a crush on, Noriko (played by Aki Maeda) writes to him, persuading him to return to school so that he can attend a school trip with the class. He does, and Noriko gives him some cookies when they’re on the school bus, on their way to the school vacation.

The next thing the kids know, they’re waking up after being gassed en masse. They all have shiny metallic collars around their necks. Slowly they take account of their surroundings, realising that they’re in some sort of building. Suddenly a helicopter arrives outside, and out jumps Kitano, the class’ teacher from a few years back. (Kitano is played by ‘Beat’ Takeshi, the maverick actor/director renowned internationally for films such as SONATINE (1993), HANA-BI (1997), and VIOLENT COP (1989). ‘Beat’ Takeshi’s real name is of course Takeshi Kitano.) Kitano explains why the kids are here (“The BR Act – Today’s lesson is… you kill each other off… until there’s only one left. No rules.”), and tells them to watch a video which will instruct them as to their fate. The video explains the idea of Battle Royale and is presented by a cute, overly-enthusiastic young girl. The kids are on a 10km island, which is divided into zones. One of the class is whispering to her friend – “No whispering” shouts Kitano before hurling a knife into her forehead. The girl drops down dead, to the obvious horror of her classmates, many of whom had presumably thought this was just a joke until this moment. A counter appears on the screen telling us that there are ’41 to go’, and naming the dead girl (the class initially consists of 42 kids – a class of 40, plus two ‘transfer students’). Zones on the island will become danger zones when announced by Kitano, and anyone lingering in that zone after a given time will have their collar activated, which leads to death. Kitano demonstrates on a particularly difficult student, Shuya’s friend Nobu. His neck is blown open in a gush of blood. ’40 to go’. There is a three day time limit on the ‘game’, after which everyone’s collar will be activated unless there is a winner. The winner can then go home. “Any questions?” asks Kitano. One student asks how they were chosen. Kitano tells him “by impartial lottery”. The kids’ current teacher didn’t agree with his class’ selection for Battle Royale, and Kitano pulls a sheet off a table to reveal the teacher’s corpse underneath. Another kid asks “why are you doing this?” - Kitano’s ‘answer’; “Life is a game – so fight hard and see if you’re worth it”. Each kid is given a pack containing food and water plus a weapon, which may or may not be useful. They are then allowed to leave the building one by one, according to rota. “The game begins”.

This takes us to about the 25 minute mark in the film. The next hour or so is made up of the various battles and allegiances that the students form, accompanied by the counter each time a killing is made. Some students kill themselves, others band together, whilst others still take obvious pleasure in the chance to kill their fellow students. Our heroes are Shuya and Noriko, who band together with one of the ‘transfers’, Kawada (played by Taro Yamamoto). It turns out that Kawada is a previous winner of the BR contest, and has been forced to take part in this bout in order to fix the game. To win the previous contest, Kawada was forced to kill his girlfriend. He also reveals that the other ‘transfer’ was a guy who paid to be included in the game. This guy is a loony, and is involved in lots of melees around the island. One of the girls, Mitsuko, takes great pleasure in the battle and sets about righting the perceived wrongs her classmates have done her over the years. Eventually, only Shuya’s group are left alive and there are a couple of twists in the story before the end of the film – to say more would be unfair to those who haven’t yet seen it.

BATTLE ROYALE is a bit of a departure from style for director Kinji Fukasaku, who is one of Japan’s best-known directors, largely as a result of his extremely influential 1968 film BLACK LIZARD (aka ‘Kurotokage’). He has made a steady stream of films over the last 40 years, including the big budget 1980 US/Japan co-production VIRUS, and many yakuza/chambara films. He also directed parts of the 1970 US/Japan co-production TORA! TORA! TORA! However, he has never really made anything else like BR. BR is based on a best-selling novel by Koshun Takami, which could be loosely summarised as "‘Lord of the Flies' with guns". The film is presumably intended as social commentary and as a warning, both to Japan’s youth and to its older generations. However, it doesn’t really work as either. The idea is fine, but there are too many holes in the plot; how come the students don’t seem to have ever heard of Battle Royale before (the media are evidently very interested in it)? Why use a process of ‘impartial lottery’? This doesn’t weed out the worst sections of society, and doesn’t answer any of the problems caused by out-of-control young people. What is the survivor taught by the process? In what way are they more fit for society after it? I could go on…

The film is also overlong at almost two hours. How many ways can one film the same scene? One kid (bad) is about to kill another kid (good) when they are saved by the intervention of a third kid (usually good). Don’t forget that this is supposedly a fairly large island, yet the kids constantly stumble on each other, without any obvious means of finding one another. The ending is also odd, mixing black humour with supposed revelations about the key characters, but leaving me very much under-whelmed. The screener is seemingly uncut (if there were any cuts then they certainly weren’t obvious to me), yet the killings are nothing like as violent as I had expected. Perhaps the most shocking involves a girl being machine-gunned before being kicked viciously (whilst still alive) by her killer. She is then shot again in close-up, with an explosion of dodgy-coloured blood. Certainly, the film is quite violent, but nothing like as OTT as many other Japanese films (Kitano’s films are easily as violent, and are certainly more shocking). Apparently, Fukasaku prepared a re-edited version which removed some of the violence, but I really don’t see that much of a problem with it myself. The film will undoubtedly run into problems here in the UK with its many scenes of violence to young women (with both males and females as perpetrators), so it will be interesting to see how it fairs when it is released later this year.

Perhaps the main reason that I wanted to see the film was for Beat Takeshi. I’m an avid fan of Kitano’s work, both as actor and director, and I was interested to see how he handled the (unsympathetic) role of the teacher in the film. As always, he is excellent, introducing some (admittedly black) humour and giving a solid performance. His laid-back, tracksuit-wearing character seems very out of sorts with the cold-blooded killer that apparently lurks below the surface, and the film attempts to justify this by his daughter’s rejection of him and his animosity towards the children as a result of years of jeering. Kitano imbues the teacher with a sense of ‘worldly weariness’, as in many of his performances in his own films. In one scene, he appears to Shuya and Noriko out of nowhere, in the midst of a downpour. He stands holding an umbrella, in a scene that immediately reminded me of a very similar one in Takashi Ishii’s GONIN (1995). Whether this was Fukasaku’s intention or not I don’t know, but the scene draws a strange parallel between the two Kitano characters (he played a camp hitman in GONIN) that seems to work somehow… maybe it’s just me… At the end of the film, we see the result of something we’ve glimpsed Kitano doing throughout the film – a painting, showing a mountain upon which lie all the dead children. In the middle stands Noriko, surrounded by a halo of light. The painting is characteristic of Kitano’s artwork (showcased in some of his own films, most notably HANA-BI), but seems oddly out of place in this film, as if Fukasaku was trying for deeper meaning but failing. One other Kitano-related note is that the cinematographer on BR was Katsumi Yanagishima, Kitano’s regular cinematographer.

What else can I say about BR? Certainly anyone who, like me, has endured the months of waiting for this film to arrive is going to be disappointed. It’s not a gore-fest, nor is it a scathing satire. It’s somewhere in between, I guess, but it never really seems to gel together. It isn’t a failure, but one can’t help but feel that it could have been so much more… BR addresses some questions of trust that are raised, and plays to the current Japanese fear of their offspring, but never really says anything meaningful about… well, anything really. OK, so it’s only a film and it is fairly entertaining, but still… I guess I’d hoped for something more substantial.

As a sidenote, the music in the film consists of various well-known classical works, as well as a theme that seemed vaguely reminiscent of STAR WARS to me for some reason... It was composed by Masamichi Amano, who regularly scores the UROTSUKIDOJI films.