12:45pm | Considering its huge box-office take, statistically there’s a reasonable chance you have seen The Hunger Games, a contrived but fun film (at least up until its ludicrous climax, which is lazy garbage). But there would be no “Hunger Games” — literary or cinematic — without Battle Royale, a far superior piece of cinema.1
Luckily, the good folks at Long Beach Cinematheque and the Art Theatre had the smarts to book Battle Royale for a near-midnight screening this Friday, so you can get some big-screen satisfaction in all the places The Hunger Games left you wanting.
Unlike The Hunger Games, which goes to some lengths to set up the universe in which the story takes place, Battle Royalequickly dispenses the exposition via a series of flashy graphics:
At the dawn of the Millenium, the nation collapsed. At 15% unemployment, 10 million were out of work, 800,000 students boycotted school. The adults lost confidence, and fearing the youth, eventually passed the ‘Millenium Educational Reform Act’…AKA: The BR Act.
It’s not that director Kinji Fukusaku and screenwriter Kenta Fukusaku are being lazy; it’s that, for what the film is — a stylish cinematic thrill-ride that can be both funny and touching — they don’t need to give us more. Does it really make sense that the adults of Japanese society have embarked on the order-restoring strategy of randomly selecting one school class per year to participate in a three-day fight to the death? Don’t worry about it. Right from the start we get a sense that we’re on a roller-coaster, so just sit back and enjoy the ride.
That “don’t worry about it” will take you far in processing Battle Royale, as the filmmakers, in a practice more common to contemporary Japanese cinema than what we’ve got this side of the Pacific pond, allow and even employ incongruous plot and narrative elements in creating was is meant more as a piece of art than a story. Yes, there’s a plot and character development (well, sort of), but Battle Royale isn’t about that. Does the film’s logic always remain internally consistent? Don’t worry about it.
Despite such an approach, Battle Royale is probably more successful than The Hunger Games in commenting on human nature. The latter is certainly more ambitious, but in the end we’re left feeling many of the characters onscreen are just empty suits. Battle Royale has a narrower scope, but it pretty well hits the targets at which it aims. When the game begins, for example, some students commit suicide rather than partake in the bloodsport — which no doubt rings truest to many of us projecting ourselves into such a scenario. Later, sex is used as a weapon — certainly a real-life strategy. And speaking of weapons, it’s a nice touch that the assignment of weapons is random. As in life, not everyone enters this brutal game on equal footing.
And speaking of weapons — again — there’s a truly hilarious instructional video the kids are shown prior to the game’s beginning, sort of an infomercial of death delivered by a futuristically-clad sexpot of a host. (So wacky are the images that clips of this “infomercial” were featured prominently — without alteration — on The Flaming Lips tour behind Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.)
The violence of Battle Royale is both more enjoyable and more shocking than what we get in The Hunger Games. Whereas director Gary Ross pulled so far back from the gore that he hurt himself in the pathos department, Fukusaku goes all the way and further, at times giving us some Tarentino-esque laughs and thrills (a mass shootout stemming from an argument was another sequence so good The Flaming Lips used it on tour), at others allowing us to really feel for the brutality these poor kids are made to endure.
Battle Royale screens Friday, April 13, at 11:30pm.
Art Theatre of Long Beach, 2025 E. 4th Street, (562) 438-5435
FOOTNOTES:
1I haven’t read any of the books in question, so I can’t compare the two on that score.