Battle Royale (バトル・ロワイアル). The adults of Japan pass a law that sends off randomly chosen high school classes to deserted islands for the students to kill each other off. Why? To punish Japan’s delinquent youth for their contempt and disrespect of the older generation.

There are rules to the game. If a student wants to go back home, he has to kill everybody else. Yes, all his classmates. Even his best friends. That’s such a horrifying dilemma, isn’t it. Everybody is given a random weapon. Everyone has three days in the game to accomplish the mission. If more than one student is left alive by three days, nobody wins, everybody dies.

Battle Royale is a disturbing movie. But I really liked it. It made me think who would get killed next and by whom. It made me sympathize with the dilemma among friends. Would you really kill your best friends so you can go home? Some say the pacing of the movie was too fast. I disagree, I thought the movie introduced an ample number of the class’s students well enough so audiences could understand the relationships each of them had with their classmates. It made me think a lot in the end too. About the nature of man. The dynamics of friendships and social groups. Basta, the movie can really make you think, if you tread the path of thought. There even are a lot of fan sites in the web to answer ‘unanswered’ questions from the film.

My rating: 8/10

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