バトル・ロワイアル
Action, Drama
Japan
Language: Japanese
Subtitles: English and Czech
Directing: Kinji Fukasaku
Starring: Tatsuya Fujiwara, Aki Maeda, Tarō Yamamoto, Chiaki Kuriyama
Distributor: Toei Company
If you want to see the predecessor of such global phenomena as The Hunger Games and Squid Game, you should revisit the twenty-five-year-old Japanese genre classic Battle Royale. Few Japanese films have left such a deep mark on global pop culture as this explosive combo of dystopia, high school melodrama, and brutal action thriller about hunting people. In the West, it quickly gained a reputation as an uncompromising spectacle full of cynical and cruel irony and explicit violence. Set in a totalitarian Japan in the near future, where society sends random high school classes to a remote island where students must fight to the death until the last one survives, the story had been known in Japan for some time before the making of the film. It is, in fact, an adaptation of Kōshun Takami’s bestselling book. With teenage relationship melodramas being a popular Japanese genre, the original work focuses primarily on the intense dramas of love and friendship among classmates. The film version, directed by renowned genre veteran Kinji Fukasaku (especially known as the creator of disillusionment-riddled yakuza films), concentrates on the participants and their tragic fates within the satirically grotesque mechanism of the deadly game. The absurd rules and meaning of its existence are never explained, only implied, coming across as a self-serving, bluntly cruel joke, exactly in the spirit of comedian, actor, and director Takeshi Kitano who portrays one of the Battle Royale game organizers. The principle of narration mixing elements of popular genres with the then-emerging reality show format, became an important paradigm not only for the global hits mentioned above, but also for a number of Japanese manga featuring dangerous and bizarre competitive games where life is at stake.
