Battle Royale (2000)

“Japanese cinema has recently given us some brilliant violent parables of cultural malaise – from the survivors of a bus hijacking in Shinji Aoyama’s Eureka, to the sadistic fetish-princess of Takashi Miike’s Audition. But neither has the effrontery and the sheer outrageousness of this extraordinary machine-tooled piece of provocation from veteran yakuza director Kinji Fukasaku. It’s a futuristic nightmare; it’s a satirical vision of Japan’s fear and horror of its recalcitrant, disorderly younger generation; it’s a pulp-sploitation shocker with guns, knives, blood and kinky school uniforms. But what it is most of all is violent: very, very violent, the kind of violence which is not ironised in the manner we have become accustomed to in the past 10 years, but presented in an eerily formal melodrama complete with stately, Kubrickian passages of pop classics on the soundtrack.” – The Guardian UK

“Battle Royale victimized the students and villainized the leaders. By doing so, it pointed out that adolescent violence always has a root cause. Furthermore, Fukasaku highlighted the consequences of pushing a nation’s citizens to the brink of madness.

“The main thing that makes Battle Royale stand out and sets it apart from other movies like The Hunger Games or The Running Man is that these children are classmates and most of them grew up with each other. This creates an amazing feeling of tension and disbelief at some of the films most gruesome deaths.

We don’t get a lot of screen time with all the children as there’s only so much we can explore within a two-hour run-time. Yet somehow, writer Kenta Fukasaku and director Kinji Fukasaku both did an outstanding job making the audience understand how being forced into a life or death situation can change even the gentleness kind-hearted person to an axe-wielding murder in a matter of minutes. That makes the audience feel for each death, and this is one of Battle Royale’s greatest accomplishments.” – Phenixx Gaming