Lucid NonsenseMovies / 2000
Battle Royale
バトル・ロワイアル
Seen in a theater
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.
- Release year
- 2000
- Released
- Dec 16, 2000
- Country
- Japan
- Genres
- Drama · Thriller · Action
- Directed by
- Kinji Fukasaku
- Written by
- Kenta Fukasaku
- Other credits
- Koushun Takami (original creator)
- Cast
- Tatsuya Fujiwara (Shuya Nanahara (Boy #15)) · Aki Maeda (Noriko Nakagawa (Girl #15)) · Takeshi Kitano (Kitano) · Taro Yamamoto (Shogo Kawada (Boy #5)) · Masanobu Ando (Kazuo Kiriyama (Boy #6)) · Ko Shibasaki (Mitsuko Souma (Girl #11)) · Chiaki Kuriyama (Takako Chigusa (Girl #13)) · Takashi Tsukamoto (Shinji Mimura (Boy #19)) · Sousuke Takaoka (Hiroki Sugimura (Boy #11)) · Yukihiro Kotani (Yôshitoki Kuninobu (Boy #7))
Review
I'd not seen this movie in 20 years and I remembered is as a campy, gory film with unexpected influence. And that really sells it short, this is a great movie, full stop. There is a reason this movie launched a sub genre of both fiction and video games, it nails so many things. I think what struck me most viewing it again was how the movie has a dozen vignettes we get to see play out. Friendships, rivalries, and cliques all play the same game to much the same result, but the film does a great job of establishing all of this at lighting speed. There is the main through-line with the leads but their classmates get a ton of screen time which lends the entire affair a huge degree of verisimilitude. Oh, also if you can catch the 25th anniversary screening it starts an interview with the writer, Kenta Fukasaku which is really interesting as his dad directed this.
Consumption history2
Completed
Theater viewing
- Unknown
Completed
External identifiers
- tmdb
- 3176
- letterboxd
- 25zS