Kinji Fukasaku’s final completed feature is perhaps an outlier on this website, since it could be argued it’s more sci-fi due to its dystopian future setting, or maybe more of an action thriller, but the cracked leather skin that wraps it all up is horror. Horror in the vein of The Last House on the Left or, more pertinently, the 1976 Spanish shocker, Who Can Kill a Child?
Although this is a Japanese film, it’s on a completely different plane to those Western efforts. A more relevant precedent would be Fukasaku acolyte Takashi Miike’s 1996 yakuza flick, Fudoh: The New Generation, in which a high-schooler recruits classmates and even younger kids to take on the mob, exacting bloody vengeance against those who killed his brother while receiving no quarter for their age from the enforcers who come after them.
Miike’s work, however, is infused with a certain working-class sense of humour that revels in pushing boundaries, whereas Fukasaku’s cinema is much, much bleaker.
Battle Royale is well known as an all-out attack on the hypocrisy and brutality of the adult world, the zenith of Fukasaku’s lifelong disgust over what happened to him and his childhood workmates during a bombing raid on a munitions factory during the Second World War.
Adapted by Kenta Fukasaku from Koushun Takami’s novel of the same name, Battle Royale is set in a near-future Japan where class-loads of kids are bussed out, knocked out and press-ganged into the deadly, state-sanctioned Battle Royale competition. The kids are sent to an abandoned island to murder each other over the course of three days, and should they refuse to comply in any way, the irremovable trackers around their necks will set off an explosive charge, blowing their throats wide open.
Under the cold surveillance of Beat Takeshi’s bitter teacher, Kitano, students Shuya and Noriko must survive the next three treacherous days, armed with whatever they can get their hands on, fending off their former classmates and two random older boys who seem to know the territory.
Compared to some of Fukasaku’s other films, such as Graveyard of Honour and Street Mobster, Battle Royale is a relatively fun affair, which says a lot given that it’s about mass child murder. Those earlier films are incredibly despairing, while Royale is imbued with hope, however tainted and sad. It is a cry for teen rebellion against an older generation who seek to crush troubled, confused disobedience with organised, bloodthirsty savagery.
The ensemble cast weather the film’s hardships with heartbreaking truthfulness as their imminent collective fate unearths grievances, jealousies, and the strength of their friendships, alongside desperate expressions of their crushes. In that, the screenwriter and director never allow pessimism to override the honest ignorance of innocence. Where Miike’s kids were on the offensive, Fukasaku’s are on the defensive.
Battle Royale still holds up as a mighty piece of work, making that always-amazing ability of eastern filmmakers to tackle sensitive or taboo subject matter as pulp entertainment in a way we westerners simply can’t.
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