Battle Royale (2000)

Rare is the film these days that treats violence and death as serious subjects, even rarer if the protagonists are teens. Any serious examination of violence runs the risk of either being misinterpreted and vilified or going so far that it ends up glorifying what it condemns. So it's no wonder this Japanese powder keg has received no release this side of the Pacific -- parents' groups, for one, would pitch a fit. The premise is simple: A law passed by an economically-fucked Japan in the near future requires that one ninth-grade class at the end of every school year be taken to a remote island and forced to participate in Battle Royale -- three days in which all the students have to kill each other until one is left. There's plenty of opportunity for bleak comedy here, and some disbelieving laughs are existent (particularly in the film's tour-de-force welcome-to-Battle-Royale sequence), but for the most part this is played straight. Death and murder aren't a laughing matter -- these are real people with real feelings and real lives. Even the smallest characters get some manner of emotional investment before they're offed, which makes the film far more compelling than any Dead-Teenager exploitative treatment of this material would have been. For deconstructionists, there's also several different metaphorical directions the film can be seen as taking -- the BR as rite of passage into adulthood (especially considering the competitive nature of higher education in Japan), the BR act as generation-gap mistrust, the volability of human relationships, etc. etc. Several story quibbles pop up (most notably, how come the kids don't seem to know about Battle Royale?), but they're minor and easily overlooked. This is fairly astonishing and potent shit, and well worth the effort it takes to find it. It's not an easy watch, though, so the easily offended might wanna give this a wide berth.

Grade: A-