Sometimes a movie is so controversial that the American government decides to just totally ban it's presence in the United States. Battle Royale a film by Kinji Fukasaku as interpreted from the original novel Koshun Takami. The original premise of the film centers around a corrupt Japanese government that runs a military training and survival program which focuses around a lord of flies esque group of children that are forced to fight to the death by their captors. The movie begins with a tale of a father’s suicide and how the main character Shuya Nanahara came to be an orphan and how he made his way into the high school class he was in. Skipping about 5 minutes into the movie the children are slowly waking up in a deserted classroom with military personal all around and the basis for the BR program being conducted to them. The program coordinator explains how the youth is completely out of line these days and deserves to be put into their proper place in society. Hence the creation of the BR military program as a means of fear mongering and anti social subversion through the means of excessive force that is purely an internal self conflict between what is right and wrong. Within the first ten minutes the head coordinator throws a knife through the head of one of the students. I feel this represents just how fickle and unimportant a single life is when viewed by the government. The students are explained the situation by a unnecessarily cheery video and are distributed their supply bags, in which each contains a random weapon and certain survival supplies and foods. The movie instantly flows into the fight scenes in which death is as common as the numbers that track each of the children. Instantly the movies is reduced to a slaughter and gore fest in which the original meaning of the book was thrown away for the cheap thrills and mind blowing gore effects. The original novel came to symbolize what competition does in the most extreme circumstances and how social Darwinism is sometimes thrust forward upon the unwilling. Rather than keep all of the interesting philosophical aspects, the movie interpretation became something of an extreme representation of the game of life.
The movie slowly goes through the death of almost each student, some of the situations are much more interesting than others. For example a female character, Mitsuko; fools a young man by offering him sexual favors and then right before the boy “makes his move” she cuts his neck and face open with a straight razor. Another rather interesting situation is the moral conflict scene that the protagonist Shuya faces when he “accidentally” kills one of his classmates after trying to escape from his rampage of murder. In this scene Shuya openly questions whether this makes him a killer and is utterly repulsed by his actions to the point of vomiting and tears. I would hate to do a plot summary of the movie, as I feel it would detract from a lot of the intrigue that would cause one to see it for themselves, and would ultimately ruin too much of the experience of watching the movie. However, I would like to delve into the fact that essentially forty one human beings were killed by the end of the program and each of the deaths was by the government; considered an honor. An honor that in no way was rewarded but simply recorded only as a statistic. It makes one question whether a democratic government really does have “the will of people” in mind or is their will whatever the government says it is?
