Battle Royale (2000)
Directed by Kinji Fukasaku
In the future, the Japanese government captures a class of ninth-grade students and forces them to kill each other under the revolutionary "Battle Royale" act.
8 connections found
View:
8 films that influenced Battle Royale
What critics say influenced Battle Royale
Aimed at a hip young audience but inspired by generational paranoia, "Battle Royale" represents something of a reversal of 1968's "Wild in the Streets," about a future America in which the voting age is dropped to 14 and people over 35 are placed in concentration camps.
Battle Royale refers to a survival contest, in the vein of The Running Man, Lord of the Flies, and The Most Dangerous Game, in which ninth grade students are sent to an island and given three days to reduce their number to one.
Either way, Kinji Fukasaku’s hilariously energetic Battle Royale -- a jazzed-up hybrid of Lord of the Flies, The Running Man, and “Survivor†based on the novel by Koshun Takami -- races along with the swift, brutal precision of a samurai sword cutting through cotton.
In 2009, Quentin Tarantino (who else?) named it his favorite film since 1992, the year his directorial career began with "Reservoir Dogs"; the mace-wielding lethal schoolgirl in " Kill Bill - Vol. 1 " is almost a direct lift from "Battle Royale."
Imagine a film that borrows equally from Hong Kong action flicks and The Breakfast Club.
Advertisement
Kitano's words echo a line of dialogue from Takashi Miike's Audition , an equally disturbing nightmare vision of contemporary Japan, in which one middle-aged businessman sums up the economy by saying, "The fittest will survive.
The great Japanese exploitation filmmaker Kinji Fukasaku ( The Green Slime , Yakuza Graveyard ) was nearly seventy when he made this masterpiece, and it turned out to be his final completed film.
Unlike Collins and Ross, Fukasaku, the director of numerous samurai and yakuza films (not to mention the 1968 monster movie known in the U.S. as " The Green Slime "), seems to believe ruthlessness is mankind's natural inclination, not an aberration.
Japanese director Kinji Fukasaku ("Message from Space"/"Virus"/"Battle Royale") helms this slimy sci-fi thriller.
Japanese director Kinji Fukasaku spent almost entire career making low-budget crime movies (like Yakuza Graveyard ), although today he his best known for the movie he completed just before his death, the masterful Battle Royale (2000).
However, the film honors The Evil Dead lesson in anatomy, as bodies are filled with an amount of blood that exceeds their suspected capacity — and most of it is emptied on screen.
Then again, the current retrospective on director Kinji Fukasaku -- maker of countless brutal yakuza flicks in the '60s and '70s, the pop-art curiosity Black Lizard and the Japanese sequences of Tora! Tora! Tora! -- doesn't contain much in the way of brooding Bressonian silences or glacier-slow pans of desolate Russian landscapes.