Movies About Gladiators

(“Chew on This” is Bill Coffin’s column on horror cinema, analyzing the some of best movies the genre has to offer, new and old.)

If you haven’t yet seen Battle Royale, you’re not alone. Despite this film’s cult status, its challenging subject matter made it the kind of movie that wasn’t even available on Region 1 DVDs, let along welcome for possible redevelopment by a Hollywood studio. For a while, you could only see this either off some Japanese bootleg or by watching it over the internet.

Now, thankfully, the movie is much more widely available, and there is even a remake in the works. Rarely do we see such a reversal of fortunes for a movie based on the tenor of its content alone, but once you watch Battle Royale, you will understand why. This is a great movie that is in turns disturbing, thrilling, horrifying, tragic and cynical. It is not a conventional horror movie by Western standards. There is no masked killer or monster or gimmicky reason for oversexed teens to perish in the post-coital afterglow.

For many viewers, Battle Royale probably comes off as an action flick, or a political thriller, but to me, this is as horrifying as horror gets. As for the reasons why, I’ll get to that in a moment. But first, let’s provide a little context for what makes Battle Royale such a special film.

I have long been a fan of foreign cinema, not because I particularly enjoy weird artsy experimentation or because I get off on reading subtitles, but because foreign cinema is almost always crafted with a whole lot fewer resources than the average Hollywood film. Even straight to video American films tend to have really high production values compared to most movie-making in other countries. And while shoestring budgets and amateurish skills have led to some truly awful movies (Turkish Star Wars and a good portion of Bollywood action flicks immediately spring to mind), this resource scarcity often pushes talented and passionate film makers to make more with less, and this gives rise to a certain inventiveness and a willingness to take chances on content a more conservative industry might pass on.

Even more importantly, however, foreign movies offer exposure to artistic sensibilities that aren’t necessarily in line with what Western audiences (and U.S. audiences in particular) have come to expect. If there is one thing most American audiences can use more of, it’s exposure to how the rest of the world does things. And movies are no different. Along these lines, foreign cinema sometimes come with political views that are alien by Western standards, and this alone is worth sampling, and the stories they give rise to are even more so. So it is with Battle Royale.

The story of Battle Royale takes place in an authoritarian Japan of the near future. Nippon has become a cruel form of gerontocracy; the country isn’t just being run by old people, it’s being run by really cruel old people who are fearful of the revolutionary potential of the current generation of schoolchildren.

To break them of this desire to overturn things, the government runs an annual competition whereby an entire grade of what would be 8th grade students in an American school are essentially abducted, taken to a remote locale and forced to battle each other to the death until only one student remains. The lone survivor comes back home to a media frenzy and one imagines some kind of reward, but you’re just not sure. The only image you’re seen of a previous winner shows a young girl so driven into psychosis by her victory that it doesn’t matter if she got a billion yen waiting for her when she gets home. Her life, such as it was before the competition, is over. And that’s just how the government likes it.

One year later: 8th grader Shuya, whose mother recently abandoned the family, and whose father recently committed suicide, is trying to enjoy the only thing he’s got left: the company of his friends as school. But despite this, Shuya is deeply disillusioned with life, as are his classmates, one of whom has become such a bad apple that he shanked a teacher named Kitano in the leg during school hours. Not long into the class trip, sleep gas is pumped into the bus and the kids all wake up on a remote island, the latest inductees into the infamous Battle Royale program. They are all marched at gunpoint into a crumbling bunker where they are met by none other than Kitano himself, who has recovered his wound and is not only too eager to take part in the government’s sadistic youth reduction protocol.

The rules of the game are simple enough: each kid is fitted with an explosive collar that will go off if tampered with, if Kitano remote detonates it, or if the wearer walks into a danger zone on the island, where merely crossing into forbidden territory radio-detonates the collar. The collars act as little GPS gadgets that let the soldiers running the program back at the bunker keep track of each student’s location. The collars also let the soldiers know when a student dies. If 24 hours pass without a single student dying, then all of the collars will detonate. Fight or die.

Each kid is given a pack with basic supplies and a random weapon. The randomness is meant to counteract any natural advantages some students might have over others, but when you see that one kids gets an Uzi and another gets a paper fan, you begin to realize that even if Battle Royale had been created as a form of political control, it has descended even further into just a sadistic exercise in screwing with relatively innocent kids.

The battleground is a small islands strewn with ruined buildings that look like abandoned post-war redevelopment efforts. Every six hours, a bunch of sectors are written off as danger zones, gradually giving the students less and less ground to hide in. Eventually, there will be no room left and even students with no will to fight will find themselves locked in mortal combat.

Right off the bat, we see that the students themselves have no interest in killing each other. They may be shiftless smartasses, but they are not murderers, and suddenly being thrust into that role is what, for me, propels this story right out of the realm of action and into that of horror. There is nothing fundamentally different to what’s going on in Battle Royale than what happens in, say, Saw. Or, for that matter, any other horror tale that rests on innocent people being forced to carry out deeds that are fundamentally repellent to them. Forcing people to do things contrary to their nature is one kind of cruelty. Forcing them to do things contrary to human nature is well beyond that. And for me, this is where Battle Royale hits home. It is the kind of horror that makes my skin crawl the most.

This was director Kinji Kukasaku’s point. At the tender age of 15, he was forced to work in a munitions factory during WWII, and he personally endured U.S. efforts to bomb him, his workplace and his entire country into oblivion. Somehow, he survived, but the experience left him deeply resentful of the adult leadership that seemed willing to sacrifice the nation’s youth on a battle it could not possibly win. He used this story to pour all of the venom in his heart into this one thing, and even though in interviews he waved the story off as a mere fable, the rage that fueled him as he made the film (itself adapted from Koushun Takami’s superior novel) is evident.

The action of the story, once it gets going, is frenetic, almost to a fault. You’ve got something like 40 students to kill off in less than an hour and a half, and the action in the film is more condensed than it is in the novel, which unfortunately relegates many of the characters to mere redshirt status. That they are all dressed in bland school uniforms that makes them difficult to tell apart only furthers this.

Characters who are developed in the novel are given cursory appearances here, usually only long enough to kill them off. And as the students shoot, stab, strangle, taze, bludgeon and poison each other into oblivion, we are at last left with the only four who really matter: Shuya, our hero, Noriko, the girl he’s got a crush on, Kawada, a tough exchange student who survived a previous stint in Battle Royale, and Kiriyama a psychotic bastard who volunteered for BR so he could begin sharpening his already overdeveloped killer instinct. Shuya, Noriko and Kawada work together in defiance of the game’s need for there to be only one survivor. And, their teamwork succeeds where other students’ efforts to collectivize their efforts fail.

All the while, Kiriyama roams the island like a black-clad force of nature, seemingly unkillable, unhindered by any sense of morality or restraint. Perhaps my favorite scene in the story is when two girls decide to stop fighting and shout out their decision to the whole island over a bullhorn. Kiriyama cuts them down with a burst of machinegun fire and then turns on the bullhorn so every student still playing the game can hear their classmates beg for mercy before he finishes them off. Kiriyama isn’t just a mutant for whom the game is uniquely suited. He is the kind of person the game will ultimately breed. On an infinite timeline, a society running Battle Royale will end up with nothing more than Kiriyamas. As the father of two, that scares the hell out of me.

In this, we see a grim circularity in this vision of Japan. The government uses its Battle Royale program to keep the youth so paranoid and terrified that they can’t possibly mount an organized resistance, but the disillusionment that results turns the kids into lawless sociopaths who end up making the government’s job that much easier. You can imagine that the government, by the time, our story begins, hardly needs any reason to justify Battle Royale: the country’s youth are so anarchistic and wild that perhaps a crash course in internecine warfare is just what these little punks need.

It speaks to Japan as it really is: a culture steeped in its own history yet hurtling headlong into modernity, forever at odds with itself as a people both holding onto its history for dear life and jettisoning it in favor of the latest trend. Given the rapid graying of the country, one can sense through Battle Royale the ongoing tension borne from Japan’s very real challenge of figuring out how to care for its own elderly. If you think that the U.S. Social Security program has problems, it’s got nothing on Japan.

This conflict between young and old comes off as a central conflict in Battle Royale, but to me, it extrapolates into something larger; the kind of institutionalized cruelty that happens whenever any government decides to put its own needs before those it is supposed to serve. The very notion of government serving its constituents rather than the other way around is indeed a fragile one, especially for those of us born into a post-WWII planet.

Prior to WWII, there were a grand total of seven working democracies on the planet. After WWII, democracy was the default form of government for the human race. It only took about ten years to make that switch. It’s not so crazy to think that one day, things might switch back somehow. I say this not as a jab at any particular U.S. administration, but at the frailty of government itself, and of the spectre of human tyranny, which lurks behind the facade of every well-intentioned effort to rule. Even the most noble of governments can become a form of hideous villainy.

When our own children are made to die for the sport of those who see more value in them dead than alive, then we’ll know that we’ve gone past our own expiration date as a society. The Japan of Battle Royale cannot last. The Shuyas, Norikos and Kawadas have their own ways of resisting and bringing things down. But they should never even need to. And yet, how many places can we find children pressed into warfare, brutalized to make a statement to other adults, and made to toil for the fortunes of their adult masters. The places are everywhere. We just choose not to look for them. And that may be the greatest horror of all.

There are folks out there bound to disagree with me on this, but I just love this movie. It’s chilling and grim, but there is something compelling about it, especially in its later stages that I keep coming back to. If the sight of watching junior high students off each other makes you uncomfortable, then plan to be uncomfortable. But don’t skip this one.

DYLMAG Rating: 9