Movie Review #29: Batoru Rowaiaru (Battle Royale)

Batoru Rowaiaru {trans: Battle Royale} (2000)
Director: Kinji Fukasaku
Writer: Kenta Fukasaku, Koushun Takami
Starring: Takeshi Kitano, Tatsuya Fujiwara, Chiaki Kuriyama

The world sucks, doesn’t it? Racist blowhards and their dog-whistling acolytes run rampant throughout the American politic. Women find themselves increasingly without basic legal protections against sexual assault and domestic violence, let alone the social services required to combat those problems. Monetary and fiscal policy continue to incentivize unchecked spending without sufficient savings to weather an economic bust. Natural disasters continue to escalate all whilst climate change deniers cherry-pick data in futile attempts to obfuscate the obvious. Fortunately, I have a solution. We’ll take one class of ninth graders, drop them on a remote island, give them random weapons, put explosive collars on their necks, and threaten to blow them all up unless they whittle their numbers down to a sole survivor. That’ll solve all our problems.

Obviously, the state-sanctioned murder of 14-year-olds will not remedy the economic or societal woes of a nation. Indeed, were it the case that such a “Program” would actually work, Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale would be a pretty rancid piece of work. Yet this cult-action classic from 2000 remains resonant despite its horrifying premise. A tightly-constructed thriller, Battle Royale is the embodiment of child horror, exposing the full scope of evils within the unchecked id. Moreover, it’s a movie whose diegesis openly addresses the terrors of its content: what other horror film is so brazen as to begin its prologue with Verdi’s “Dies Irae?” Its minimalist script and brilliant action set-pieces make for one of the most engaging thrillers ever made, a ball-busting thriller that strikes far deeper than its many imitators.

The students of an alternate history Japan have uniformly boycotted schools in the wake of the society’s economic collapse. Among these students are Class B, a group of 42 ninth graders including Shuya Nanahara (Tatsuya Fujiwara) and his best friend Nobu (Yukihiro Kotani). In response, the government passes the BR Act, sentencing one class of 9^thgraders a year to participate in a battle royale upon a remote island: the students have three days to kill each other until one remains. If not, the army will kill them all. The government even invites former survivors to return, permitting “transfer students” such as Shogo Kawada (Taro Yamamoto) and Kazuo Kiryama (Masanobu Ando) to join the Program. When Class B ends up on the chopping block, Shuya learns firsthand of the program’s viciousness, as the Program administrator, Kitano (Takeshi Kitano), kills Nobu before the Program starts. Thrust into a constantly unpredictable and constantly dangerous new environment, Shuya promises to protect his late best friend’s crush, Noriko Nakagawa (Aki Maeda), until the end. As Shuya’s classmates devolve into a state of chaos, he must struggle to keep his promise and his moral integrity intact.

Before I proceed, I must address the… thorny narrative mechanic of Battle Royale: state-sanctioned child murder. Unlike Battle Royale’s successor, The Hunger Games, Battle Royale revels in displaying child murder in repulsively violent detail, including but not limited to: mass shootings, skull combustion, vomiting blood, impalement, suicide, torture, decapitation, and genital mutilation. For many viewers, such content crosses a moral line that automatically disqualifies Battle Royale from having any artistic merit. Voyeuristically viewing violence unto children is categorically, indisputably evil, regardless of its narrative intention. Should this be your mindset, you obviously should not watch Battle Royale.

I do not adhere to this mindset.

As a general principle, I do think there are no limits to subject area in which aesthetic merit can be found, so long as the people making the film knowingly consent to the actions taking place on the screen. I likewise reserve the right to call a film a piece of immoral garbage should its artistic purpose be politically or morally revolting. Indeed, were Battle Royale mere exploitative violence along the lines of, say, Transformersor even that of well-made action films such as Game of Death, I would give it a 0.0 without hesitation. Child murder should never supply cheap thrills. Additionally, I do have some content lines I am unwilling to cross: let’s just say I have no intention of watching Caligula, Cannibal Holocaust, or A Serbian Film any time soon. However, Battle Royaleis the rare film depicting truly malignant content whose message transcends the on-screen revulsion. As I interpret the film, Battle Royale is an extremely complex allegory for the struggle of the individual amidst the state of war. The movie argues that particular behaviors and moral philosophies will be able to transcend the most destructive of mankind’s tendencies and survive to create a better tomorrow. Inconsistent and malignant ideologies, by contrast, shall destroy each other. Battle Royale is, in essence, a movie about maturing into adulthood: murder as metaphor.

The film’s narrative structure and concise script support an allegorical reading. Unlike similar films like The Hunger Gamesfranchise,Battle Royale offers neither extensive character backstory nor expansive world-building. Dialogue is sparse. Exposition is minimal. The pace is frantic. Character personalities and backstories are communicated through costume, prop, and set design. Despite its non-stop action, one could well call Battle Royale a minimalist film. In such films, symbolism trumps scripting, as character traits communicate story ideas better than poetic prose. At every turn, Battle Royale uses that minimalism to its advantage.

Needless to say, I think Battle Royale is a movie worth seeing. However, I did not want to stop this blog with a simple movie review: plenty of publications have recommended Battle Royale, and one more thumbs up makes little difference. I seek to contribute something more: a thorough analysis of Battle Royale’s allegory as examined through the fates of the film’s characters. I intend to examine allthe characters whose deaths are shown, categorizing them by how “successful” they are in the Program and how successful their philosophies are in the adult world. Accordingly, this is where a spoiler warning for the film comes into effect. If you haven’t seen the movie and do not wish to read the spoilers, I suggest you turn around here. However, if you’ve either seen the movie and wish to decompress or wish to use my analysis as a framing device for your own experience for watching the movie, I encourage you to read along.

An acknowledgment: I do not care about the original Battle Royale novel. I also do not care about the sequel film: I might watch it someday, but that is not today. Battle Royalethe film strikes me as too complete an allegory to demand a sequel, and I think watching a sequel would jade my enjoyment of the original. The novel also adopts a more traditional, non-allegorical narrative and uses conventional prose: since I find the nuanced cinematic language of Battle Royale more compelling, I will focus entirely on the film’s presentation of these characters. Should my analysis of a character clash with his/her characterization in the novel, so be it.

The rules of the Program in Battle Royaleestablish conditions similar to the “state of war” envisioned by philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. All the children are trapped on a remote island with no hope of escape. The island is divided into sectors which are gradually removed from play, restricting fighters’ breathing room. The students have but three days to kill all their peers; otherwise, their unremovable explosive collars will detonate. The students are all given equal rations but unequal, random weapons; only past winners may choose their weapons. However, students may steal weapons from those they kill or disarm. In short, we’re dealing in a world where:

1. Space is finite
2. Time is finite
3. Resources are finite
4. Advantages are random.

Not too dissimilar from the adult world, is it not? Just as one cannot choose to whom one is born, one cannot choose one’s fate in Battle Royale unless one has won before. The playing field is wholly uneven. Those who win triumph through their raw power, cunning, or luck, whereas those who lose fail through cluelessness, infirmity, or lack of resources. As the game is a simulacrum of “success” in the modern world, the victors are those who understand the rules, winning through exploiting the game’s ingrained unfairness or through manipulating others to gain an advantage. Virtues do exist beyond murderousness, but not all virtues are of equal merit. To discuss these virtues, I have split Class B into ten categories.

1. The Ignorant – Those who do not even understand what Battle Royale is
2. The Naïve – Those who comprehend Battle Royale but underestimate the danger
3. The Weak - Those who comprehend Battle Royale but lack competence to survive
4. The Suicides - Those who outright reject the game by killing themselves
5. The Perverts - Those who use the game as justification to place sexual pleasure above everything else
6. The Civilized - Those who try to establish internal laws and rules to limit the violence inherent to the game
7. The Romantics - Those who champion love as more powerful than the game and try to use the game as an opportunity to express romantic devotion
8. The Rebels - Those who try to use the resources of the game in order to break it and escape
9. The Villains - Those who use the resources of the game as an excuse to kill as many people as possible
10. The Winners - Those whose philosophies enable them to outlast everyone else

Let’s consider each group in depth. Also, as a side note, I will refrain from using any particularly violent images as visual supplements, so as to not trigger those who have suffered previous traumas. That said, I will be describing these actions through prose. Thus, for anyone who may be triggered by firearms, explosions, beheadings, suicide, prostitution, rape, genital mutilation… consider this a “proceed with caution.”

I. The Ignorant

The three ignorant students are first to die.

It’s a simple conclusion, really. If one does not know that other students will be on the warpath, one have no chance of survival. Similarly, if one does not know that everyone else seeks to survive in an adult world of limited resources, one will be left behind. What is startling about the ignorant players of  Battle Royale is that only one of them manages to enter the game alive. The other two do not even make it out of the classroom. One, Fumiyo, is caught whispering during the instructional video despite being told explicitly not to do so; as punishment, Kitano throws a knife into her skull. The other is Nobu.

Nobu

Despite his ignorance and early death, Nobu does have an important role in Battle Royale’s plot. Before the Program begins, Nobu stabbed Kitano in his buttocks; he has no qualms attacking Kitano in an attempt to escape the game. Kitano delights in returning the favor, stabbing Nobu in the behind and detonating his collar. More importantly, however, is Nobu’s role as an impulsive foil to Shuya. Though Nobu is the character who holds feelings for Noriko, it is his best friend Shuya who ends up defending her. It’s thus fitting that, in the beginning of the movie, Nobu fails to fit his head into the frame of a photo he takes with Shuya and Noriko: he loses his head figuratively and literally.

In my view, however, the quintessential demonstration of the dangers of ignorance is the first proper death during the Program: Tendo. Shuya, the audience surrogate, witnesses Tendo’s death as soon as he leaves the classroom. Tendo walks out, in plain view, with an arrow sticking out of her neck. Her only line in the movie is asking Shuya “What am I going to do? What is this?” whilst pointing at the arrow. While most lines like this should not be interpreted literally, I do think a literal reading works here. Tendo lacks the basic knowledge of what an arrow is, and, by extension that her peers cannot be trusted. Accordingly, she and all other ignorant people cannot survive.

II. The Naïve

Naïve characters play a vital narrative role in the opening minutes of Battle Royale: they serve as “fodder” for the villains to murder. They are rarely more than plot devices. As characters, though, they do comprehend the meaning of the game, but they have no idea how to play it. For some, other values supersede the game’s inherent viciousness and inhibits understanding; two tragic examples, Kaori and Mizuho, demonstrate their naïveté through killing each other after foolishly believing their friendship would survive a state of war. For others, a more pure naïveté is at work.

Megumi

The token naïve character is primary heroine Noriko’s best friend, Megumi. While waiting for Noriko, Megumi encounters the story’s primary antagonist. Megumi, holding no enmity towards this character from before the game, allows her eventual killer into her otherwise fortified lair, leaving herself completely exposed. Megumi’s weapon is a stun gun, reflective of her ability to hurt but not kill. Megumi knows that the game involves killing people; she’s just unwilling to do it. Thus, though Megumi might have had a chance of lasting a good while in the game, her death is inevitable. This fate is that much more poignant as her death scene is one of the best demonstration of Battle Royale’s mastery of suspense. More on this scene later. 

The most interesting of the naïve characters is Boy #4, Oda. Oda has one of the best weapons in the Program: a bulletproof vest. While his Kevlar would effectively protect him from the vast majority of weapons used during the battle, Oda unfortunately faces one student whom Kevlar alone cannot stop: the psychotic transfer, Kiriyama. Oda manages one smart move, feigning death upon being shot, yet he takes time to laugh like an idiot after Kiriyama seemingly walks away. Kiriyama thus returns to decapitate Oda in one of the two most violent scenes in the entire movie. Oda’s foolhardy decision illustrates that even the most advantaged of people can be destroyed should their naïveté expose them to societal risk. Though some of us may have natural or societal shields, we all have our weak spots. In the case of most adults, such naiveté emerges through lack of frugality, social ineptitude, or excess trust. In Oda’s case, it comes from literally sticking his neck out. Arrogance and naïveté are not so different.

The naïve characters do give us the two character deaths I consider the most problematic in the movie. Two of Noriko’s “friends” (read: bullies), Kusaka and Yukiko, use their weapon – a megaphone – to try and rally other students together in the hopes that they can pool their resources and escape. The two blissfully act as if no one in their class is willing to kill, despite the fact that Kitano, the administrator, has publically announced that several students have already died. Thus, Kusaka and Yukiko’s decision is one of pure stupidity, as the megaphone announces their location to the world. The villains of the story rush to their location, resulting in Kiriyama mowing them down with a machine gun three times. Their death scene is agonizingly slow, as Kiriyama places the megaphone next to one of the dying girls so her scream might be broadcast to the rest of the students. This scene is too cruel for my taste, as the film already condemned the strategy of blind trust with Megumi’s death. It’s little more than senseless violence wrought upon the naïve, and I do not think the film benefited from highlighting this theme so many times.

III. The Weak

One of the more subtle categories of “fodder” characters is a group of would-be villains I call “the weak.” These characters are willing to kill but lack the essential qualities of strategy, luck, virtue, or vice required to survive. They are, in a sense, the most slavish and brutish of the Hobbesian monsters Battle Royale unleashes. Unlike the naïve, the weak know how to play; they merely do not know how to play correctly.

The least interesting of these would-be villains is the first killer child we see in the film: Boy #1, Akamatsu. The first boy called to pick up his weapon, Akamatsu is ungainly and overweight. Though the audience learns Akamatsu is a murderer, as it sees him holding the crossbow used to kill Tendo, it’s abundantly clear Akamatsu has no idea what he is doing. He has no idea what a successful murder entails, as he spends most of his screen time flailing around and screaming. He lacks the athleticism, the coordination, and, above all, the killer instinct to “win the game.” In a “survival of the fittest” state of war, he is supremely unfit to survive. It is therefore unsurprising Akamatsu dies just as soon as he kills. He falls down a hill after getting hit in the head with a flashlight, leaving him completely open for another student to kill him accidentally. It is equally unsurprising that his highly complex weapon – a crossbow – ends up in the more symbolically appropriate hands of a pervert.

A similarly uninteresting would-be villain is Boy #3, Oki. Much like Akamatsu, Oki lacks the coordination and athleticism to win the game; indeed, when the students are thrown their bags of rations and weapons, Oki is the only one unable to catch his. Unlike Akamatsu, Oki knows enough to camouflage himself, but he’s not skilled enough to plan out an attack once he jumps out from his hiding spot. He is dangerous, to be sure, but his danger is unfocused. His primary weapon, an axe, is very appropriate. Much like Oki, an axe is incredibly dangerous to another if used properly yet incredibly dangerous to the user if used improperly: its weight leaves one exposed after a swing, and anyone who can get inside the weapon’s reach can effectively take down the wielder without major risk. Most important of all, axes are unwieldy and can harm the owner. Such happens to Oki, who ends up burying his axe in his own head.

The would-be villains are best characterized in juxtaposition to a legitimate antagonist: Kiriyama. Boy #17, named Numai, assembles the most well-armed classmates in the class and captures Kiriyama towards the beginning of the game. He and his goons are ready to finish Kiriyama, having him completely at their mercy. Though they claim they will not kill, their lackadaisical approach suggests their true malice. In his arrogance, however, Numai gives Kiriyama the opportunity to disarm him and mow him and his followers down. The pride cometh before the fall.

Motobuchi

Perhaps the most notable of the weak characters is Boy #20, Motobuchi, one of only two students to ask questions during the instruction scene. It is clear Motobuchi is one of the more intelligent students in his class; before he tries to kill Shuya, he exclaims that he wishes to survive the battle for the sole desire to make his way to university. He even quotes the quadratic formula as he tries to kill people. Motobuchi’s villainy emerges from his willingness to manipulate the traditional societal arc to his own ends, following the Program in order to achieve societal success. His primary weapon, a pistol, mirrors his to-the-point mindset. What Motobuchi lacks that the more complex “heroes” and villains of this story possess is an external understanding of the system. Motobuchi takes the rules of the game at face value: kill as many people as possible within three days, and that’s that. Indeed, his question to Kitano – “can I survive if I go home” – unlike that of a more genuinely intelligent character, Shinji, does nothing to inform his fellow students of the finer details of the battle. Much like a student who can only regurgitate information, Motobuchi is utterly helpless when put before someone who understands how to bend or look beyond the system’s basic parameters. This book-smart character thus falls to Kawada, one of only four trulysmart characters in the story.

The last of the weak is Girl #10, Hirono. One of the most popular girls and emotionally shallow students in Class B, Hirono is determined not to end up like her fellow social elite – most of whom have committed suicide rather than play along. Her approach to the Program is direct: kill the people whom she hates in real life. Much like Motobuchi, Hirono’s real life hang-ups get in the way of actual survival. Even when she has a victim nearly in her grasp, Hirono’s pride gets in her way. More concerned about not dying rather than living, Hirono ends up shocked, disarmed, and killed with her own weapon: a death as shallow as Hirono was in life.

IV. The Suicides

Unlike the ignorant, the naïve, and the weak, the rest of the children grasp the gravity of the battle ahead. In the face of this absurdity, a few characters let the boulder of Sisyphus crush them. Rather than become a murderer or a victim, these characters choose to either hang themselves or jump off a cliff. It is notable that the four on-screen suicides in Battle Royale do not openly express such altruistic motivations. After all, these are Japanese children; few of them are reading French existential philosophers and using the now-literal viciousness of their absurd worlds as justification for suicide. Instead, the four suicides emerge from more conventional motives. All four suicides are in long-term relationships: much like Romeo and Juliet, they cling to notions of doomed teenage romance and decide to die by their own hands rather than kill each other.

Yet Kinji Fukasaku has sympathy for the suicides. Unlike almost every other child death in the film, these characters’ deaths are treated with tact and empathy. The camera does not linger on their corpses or even show the actual moment of death in either case. Though the film certainly condemns suicide from an allegorical perspective – after all, these students do lose the game – it does not condemn suicide from a narrative perspective. The director seems to acknowledge that, under these particular circumstances, in which murder becomes a necessity for survival, intentionally opting into one’s own death might be the most moral option available. However, this interpretation only functions under a cursory exploration of the narrative: it’s clear that the film wishes to condemn suicide as a means of avoiding the difficulties of the adult world on an allegorical level.

(Note: one other character in the movie commits suicide, but she belongs in a different section. More on that later.)

V. The Perverts

Sex plays a complex role in adult life and thus has a similarly complicated role in Battle Royale.In a state of war such as Battle Royale creates, some default to pleasure as the sole locus of moral authority; as there are no luxuries on the island except sex – no lush food, no warm baths, no moment to relax – sex becomes, for a small group, the only motivation. These characters are the most repugnant in the movie, as their depravity eerily mirrors that of real-world predators. Making matters all the more terrifying is the fact that these characters are children.

They are also all male. The female characters of Battle Royale are not without libido: after all, several female characters express sexual desire for different boys, with some having lost their virginity before the Program even begins. However, their sexual desires are tempered and their romantic urges are often platonic. Only the men of Battle Royaleindulge in sexual power fantasies: fantasies the film wholeheartedly condemns as immoral and blinding. Two boys, Takiguchi and Tadakatsu, are killed offscreen after being seduced by another student; we only ever see their naked bodies as their killer walks away whilst buttoning up her shirt. The two clearly fell prey to their own predacious sexuality, despite the fact they were both competently armed.

The most important pervert in the movie adopts a far more sinister role. The boy who steals Akamatsu’s crossbow is a boy named Niida. A crossbow has a simple function: it penetrates. Niida only ever talks about sex. Yet Niida has no clue how sex actually works. After all, he kills Akamatsu by prematurely firing the crossbow while trying to return the weapon to its owner. He does not even possess a metaphorical phallus of his own. Niida is also completely inept: indeed, even Akamatsu, the most physically awkward character in the cast, would have killed Niida had Niida not accidentally ejaculatedejected an arrow. He is the ultimate pervert of Class B.

Niida

Niida’s brief backstory and fate highlight how repulsive his predacious yet impotent sexuality truly is. Niida once spread around a rumor that he had sex with a girl named Chigusa, one of the most popular girls in his class. In the Program, Niida discovers Chigusa and demands that she have sex with him, claiming she liked the attention the rumor created. Niida, believing everyone is going to die, feels himself entitled to get his dick wet. When Chigusa refuses, calling him disgusting, he threatens to force himself on her and penetrate her with his crossbow. He succeeds in grazing and scarring Chigusa’s face. He needn’t have fired the bow; his sexual violence was already done. We thus feel little sympathy for Niida as Chigusa takes her revenge in the most violent scene of the movie, wherein she chases him down with a knife and stabs his genitals. Three times. Even in a place where violence is the norm, the complete devaluation of humanity that is rape cannot be tolerated.

There’s also another mechanic at work in the Niida episode: it’s the first major moment of Battle Royale in which the gamification of murder loses its thrill. While child murder is scary in concept, the over-the-top nature of Battle Royale’s violence can lead the viewer to voyeuristically enjoy the game, riling the viewer’s bloodlust through successful employment of suspense. On some level, we want to know “who’s going to die next,” as the narrative pay-offs through satisfying scares, gripping gore, or chilling cut-aways keep us guessing. Niida’s threat to rape Chigusa, however, is the first moment in the movie where no sane-minded viewer can ever enjoy what is going on. With one line of dialogue, it’s as if the viewer’s suspension of disbelief crumbles into ash as we dread the potential consequences. Though Chigusa’s revenge provides catharsis, the genuine terror of Niida’s threat snaps the viewer back to reality. It’s a moment in which an audience can no longer revel in the violence, setting the viewer up for the three most emotionally impactful and tragic episodes in the movie.

VI. The Civilized

The following three groups are, in my opinion, the three most interesting in the movie and have the most bearing on the manner in which most individuals live their adult lives. These three groups produce the most emotionally resonant and impactful scenes and set-pieces in Battle Royale as well, serving not as catalysts for the developments of the heroes and villains of the piece but rather as groups that could, potentially, outlast the conditions of the game. Tragically, the film’s conclusion is that none of these three supposed escapes from the state of war works. Much like Niida’s death, these episodes also serve as condemnations of the audience’s enjoyment of the film’s violence.

Utsumi

The most traditionally tragic of these groups is the lot of Girl #2, Yukie Utsumi. Utsumi immediately establishes herself as one of the film’s most likeable and competent peripheral characters. She assembles a group of four other girls and one boy, rallying them together to create a powerful alliance within the game. Their common purpose: rescuing other kids playing and convincing them to band together and escape the game as one. Their rule: don’t kill people. Utsumi’s group pools its resources, takes up stock in one of the safest locations on the island, develops a family dynamic, and works to restore injured people to health. In one of the most hope-inspiring scenes in the movie, Utsumi restores Shuya to health and openly asks about the safety and location of his friends in order to better assist them. Her kind-heartedness and clear-headedness are a breath of relief in a film that has, up until this point, has been a cesspool of human despair. Though she is no innocent – her coy comments about having to strip Shuya in order to dress his wounds reveal a naughty side – she genuinely has others’ good at heart. It is thus crushing when Yukie’s attempt to create a civilized world implodes.

Utsumi’s group eventually perishes in one fell swoop thanks to its misguided idealism. Part of the alliance’s rules is its wholehearted condemnation of murder. However, one of the members, Yuko, witnessed the death of Oki earlier in the movie and, not unfairly, blames Shuya for Oki’s death. She is horrified by the prospect of a murderer entering into the fold. Utsumi, by contrast, partly because her society’s goal requires large numbers and partly because she is attracted to Shuya, is far more happy to add one more person to her numbers. We thus have an unspoken conflict between the society’s goalsand the society’s rules. Yuko tries to put the rules into effect by poisoning Shuya’s food, attempting to exact justice. However, that justice is misapplied when someone else in the group eats Shuya’s meal by accident. The audience then looks on in horror as Utsumi’s girls start to blame each other for the murder. Utsumi tries to keep the girls together, but their paranoia boils over to the point where they all murder each other in one bloody shoot-out.

The lighthouse massacre is that much more tragic an episode than everything we’ve seen before largely because Utsumi’s enterprise was doomed from the start. Unlike a traditional society, Utsumi’s group does not concentrate power into a single figure who has a monopoly on violence. All of the girls have guns, and all of them are, to one degree or another, paranoid about their chances of survival. While Utsumi may be the leader and the most level-headed of the bunch, all of them believe themselves individually responsible for maintaining order. Each feels justified in enacting revenge if another breaks the rules. Rather than being a society based on power, virtues, or other guiding principles, Utsumi’s clan is built upon mutual paranoia. The interest in group preservation so thwarts the good of individuals that the society is doomed from the start. And, in a bitter dramatic irony, the group manages to kill everyone except the person who first poisoned the food. It’s only after witnessing her friends kill each other that Yuko realizes how doomed her plan was. She thus commits suicide, making her the sole suicide in the film to arise from guilt.

The death of this doomed society is a critical condemnation of a basic philosophy many people follow: be “normal,” be “civilized,” be “good.” “Be good” might be valuable advice in certain situations, but it is childish advice. Everyone has a different interpretation of what “be good” means, and when people try to enforce that good, evil is the result. Every one of the girls in Utsumi’s group has a justification for taking up arms against her sisters; their fears are legitimate even if the basis for that fear is not. Each one feels compelled to make her own law, and the society collapses.

VII. The Romantics

Love may make the world go round, but it does not ensure survival. Like The Hunger Games, Battle Royale does contain a love triangle – one that is admittedly difficult to follow given the pacing of the story, but one that nonetheless exists. One might suspect, then, that the emotional demands of these characters’ lives would rise above the conflict. Since love is so powerful a storytelling mechanism, surely these characters should survive. The will to love is the will to live and do anything for one’s beloved. Battle Royale, however, does believe in a different cliché about love: love is blind, but love is blinding. The three characters in the love triangle of Battle Royale all die, and not one sees it coming.

Chigusa

The first member of the triangle to die is Chigusa, played by Chiaki Kuriyama (more famous for her role as Gogo Yubari in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. I). Chigusa is the only of the three characters to receive any background, as we see a flashback of her running ahead of her crush, Hiroki, as part of her cardiovascular training. Though Hiroki promises to always remain behind her, Chigusa keeps running ahead. Her heart is similarly ahead of Hiroki’s, as Chigusa holds unrequited feelings for her training partner while he harbors his own crush for another. Chigusa is not without an edge, though, as she is willing to preserve her purity at any cost. When Niida attacks her, threatening her with rape, Chigusa largely dismisses him; it is only when Niida’s crossbow bolt scratches her face that Chigusa actually gets angry. Her exterior beauty and her emotional integrity tarnished, Chigusa descends into pure viciousness and performs the most brutal act of murder in the movie. Her weapon: a butterfly knife – lethal in use though beautiful when used by a competent fighter. In her rage, she fails to notice another student hiding in the bushes, ready to gleefully gun her down. Chigusa manages to flee, despite suffering mortal injuries, dying in Hiroki’s arms. She recognizes Hiroki could not have loved her and passes on, her passion for Hiroki and obsession with her own beauty having blinded her to her fate.

Hiroki is similarly blind. One of the most “heroic” characters in Battle Royale, Hiroki saves Shuya from an attack by Kiriyama and brings him to a place of perceived safety among Utsumi’s group. He even shows platonic love for Chigusa, allowing her to die peacefully in his arms after she flees her killer. For most of the game, he is all but invincible, managing to fight Kiriyama one on one and survive. Throughout the entire Program, he single-mindedly pursues his beloved, Kayoko. He is constantly striving for love, as would a romantic poet; it is therefore fitting that his weapon is a tracking device that can be used to find anyone. Yet his final discovery of that love results in his downfall. Though Hiroki loves Kayoko, he failed to voice his love before the Program begins. Thus, as he runs towards Kayoko with hope in his heart, Kayoko can only see another student out to kill her. She thus shoots him down, not realizing until it is too late that she would have been safe from harm. Kayoko, the last member of the triangle, is receptive to the idea of love once she realizes Hiroki held feelings for her, but she is left without options. Her best friend, Chigusa, is dead. Her would-be lover, Hiroki, is dead. She wasted all her bullets gunning Hiroki down. And she’s alerted every villain to her presence by using a firearm. Left with no friends in the game and nothing to hold onto aside from her own existence, Kayoko has no options other than death itself, a death the most nihilistic student in Class B is more than willing to supply.

Though Battle Royale certainly does not wish to condemn love and romance – after all, two of the game’s winners succeed largely through pursuing some form of romantic ideal – it does condemn a single-minded, all-consuming approach to romance. While characters like Chigusa, Hiroki, and Kayako have some successes when striving to discover love, they do a very poor job of protecting it. Sure, Hiroki can defeat the most powerful villain in the Program while on his way to discovering Kayoko, but he cannot survive an attack once he finds what he’s looking for. Nor does the film imply that creating an unending romantic journey can also provide moral salvation; Chigusa keeps running ahead in unrequited romance, yet she ends up caught in an ambush. In having the romantic characters die the way they do, Battle Royale suggests romance can help one avoid chaos but not nihilism; it may tide us over from the meaninglessness of existence, but it cannot save us from mankind’s more innately destructive tendencies.

VIII. The Rebels

For many, the decay of society itself represented by the fall of Utsumi’s group or the fate of the star-crossed lovers is the emotional breaking point of Battle Royale. For me, though, the breaking point was the death of the smartest boy in the class, the rebel with a cause, Shinji: the only character to try to not only manipulate the battle royale, but to destroy it from the inside out. Shinji not only understands the system better than any other character in the game, but he also finds a means of escaping it and very nearly succeeds. While Utsumi tries to build a society of her own in order to counter a more oppressive one, Shinji directly takes arms against that oppressive society. However, his failure to anticipate the negative externalities of the system leaves him a victim of his own revolution, left with no option but to destroy his only means of escape in a final bid for survival.

Shinji

During the opening classroom instruction scene, Shinji is one of two students – in addition to Motobuchi – to ask questions of Kitano and the other administrators. Whereas Motobuchi merely restates the obvious with his question, “can I leave if I survive,” Shinji asks the higher level questions: “how and why was Class B chosen for the battle royale?” While the question seems wholly innocent, Shinji is using some complex problem-solving in this scene. By discovering that the class is assigned randomly, Shinji determines at least some portion of the Battle Royale program is determined by computer. Shinji can thus infer that, if he acquires the right materials, he can exploit the Battle Royale monitoring system in an attempt to escape. He thus coordinates an insurrection within the Program, hacking into the mainframe in an attempt to turn the administrators’ sensors offline while his comrades construct a bomb to blast through the school building – the island’s only exit to the pier.

Best of all, Shinji’s attempt at rebellion almost works. He manages to contact people from outside the Battle Royale to help him crack the code, and he manages to throw the entire military into a fit with his computer viruses. While Kitano is able to undo most of Shinji’s progress using a manual reset, Shinji still acquires the window of opportunity needed to rig up his bomb and destroy the school. In essence, Shinji takes on the system and wins… until his plans are ruined by one of his fellow students: the ever dangerous Kiriyama.

Shinji’s death at Kiriyama’s hands is one of the most disheartening in the film. All at once, Shinji sees all of his friends die, one by one, to Kiriyama’s machine gun. Because he requires his friends to drive the car containing his bomb up to the school, Shinji thus realizes his plan fall apart piece by piece. When he tries to defeat Kiriyama in one final act of defiance, he ends up mortally wounded. As he flails, the only thing Shinji can do is shoot his own bomb and detonate it prematurely. This suicide attack manages to blind Kiriyama before the psychopath’s final showdown with Kawada, indicating that Shinji’s plan did bring about some good, but the overall result is a complete disaster as compared to Shinji’s plan.

Shinji’s revolution is a failed revolution much like a real revolution: destroyed by its own entropy. Sure, Shinji managed to throw the government’s sensors offline, but, in doing so, he also blinds himself to the location of Kiriyama: information he could have possessed and exploited through his hacking skills. Moreover, while Shinji is able to directly attack the system, he is unable to defend himself against the danger from within his own group of student revolutionaries. While Shinji worships revolutionaries before him, such as his uncle, a soldier, he does not demonstrate proper awareness of his peers. Shinji is the Georges Danton to Kiriyama’s Maximilien Robespierre. Shinji’s own rebellious spirit devours him, as he is unable to predict just how awful his classmates have become within the world the administrators have created. His revolutionary ideals come directly into conflict with either the flaws inherent in human perception and behavior (a la Hobbes) or the flaws society creates within man (a la Rousseau). Either way, Shinji’s revolution remains foiled.

IX. The Villains

As violent as all the children in Battle Royale are or eventually become, the film singles out two for antagonist status. They have the highest body counts in the film and are the only two characters whose lust for killing others is genuinely satisfied. They use more overtly violent weapons than their peers. Ominous music plays whenever they are on screen. They are the film’s purest incarnation of evil. Sure, the Program itself might produce all the evil, but it would have no effect upon most of the participants’ fates were it not for villains like these. If the Program were the sole embodiment of evil, Utsumi or Shinji’s plans might have worked. Battle Royale is no so idealistic. Evil exists, and these two characters represent the most repulsive philosophies mankind has to offer.

Kiriyama

Let’s start with the “primary” antagonist of the movie: Kiriyama. Though Kiriyama is the most lethal character in the movie, he is arguably one of its simplest characters: he is chaos. Kiriyama openly enjoys killing people, having returned to the battle royale tournament after winning. While his initial weapon is a paper fan (whose kanji translates to “the famous slapstick fan of Osaka), suggesting that Kiriyama thinks the entire game is one sick joke, Kiriyama soon trades up to a machine gun: a weapon designed for indiscriminate, wanton violence. Kiriyama wields his gun around almost carelessly, using random bursts rather than cleverly picking off his targets. Moreover, unlike the other main villain of the movie, Kiriyama often gets hurt during his exchanges. Indeed, by the end of the story, Kiriyama is completely blind from his injuries. He’s a monster of pure will, brought down by his own bloodlust the more pragmatic Kawada.

Kiriyama’s murders suggest the inherently destructive nature of entropy. Kiriyama gets stronger the longer the battle royale goes on, picking up weaponry from each fighter he kills. After killing off Numai’s gang, Kiryiyama has a massive arsenal and advantage over other players, wielding machine guns, pistols, a ninjato, and grenades with wild abandon. After tracking down Oda, he acquires the only useful defensive item: the bulletproof vest. As life continues, the powers of chaos and entropy only grow, with all things tending towards an absence of free energy. So too does Kiriyama gradually spoil the order of Class B, killing student after student, even destroying the class’s one chance at escape purely because winning the game appeals to Kiriyama more than destroying the game. The only force able to stop Kiriyama is the ever-pragmatic Kawada, and Kiriyama still manages to mortally wound Kawada with his last breath. Kiriyama thus embodies the chaos of Battle Royalemore than any other character: the brutality of man on full, sinister display.

However, as chaotic and destructive as Kiriyama is, he’s not the best or true villain of Battle Royale. No, that honor belongs to the so-called “secondary antagonist” and the best character in the movie: Mitsuko Souma. Mitsuko is the most iconic character of the film, the one whose face is most commonly featured in promotional materials for both the film and the manga, the one who catapulted her actress to mainstream status in the Japanese film industry. Mitsuko is a masterpiece of subtle characterization, rich philosophy, and empathy in the face of true evil. Mitsuko represents the ideology Battle Royale seeks most to condemn – not because it is a failure, but because its success could wipe out humanity.

A large part of Mitsuko’s excellence as the true antagonist of the movie emerges from how little we see of her until the game actually begins. Mitsuko is one of the most beautiful girls in her class, but she is also a social outcast only vaguely associated with other girls at the top of the social pyramid. She essentially vanishes when compared to girls with similar good looks but greater social adeptness. Nobody knows her, even if people may know ofher. Similarly, the audience does not know Mitsuko even exists until the first time she kills someone: the ever naïve Megumi. Their encounter – Mitsuko’s first murder – is a masterclass of suspense. Mitsuko begins by playing up obvious “scary” visual cues, such as shining her face from below with a flashlight, giving sarcastic quips, and identifying how to use a stun gun properly. We get the clue; Megumi does not. Because Mitsuko associates with socially powerful girls who often perform their way through the social ladder, girls like Megumi might describe her antics as simple jokes. Mitsuko’s “acting,” however, is not done for purpose of rising through the social ranks; rather, she acts to disguise her psychopathy. Similarly, the audience hears non-diegetic music cues suggesting Mitsuko’s evil: cues obviously beyond Megumi’s observational powers. The encounter between Mitsuko and Megumi becomes a terrifying ride towards the inevitable. we know Mitsuko will kill Megumi, but we do not know when or how. The pay-off is disgusting yet brilliantly realized.

We learn even more of Mitsuko’s character through her primary weapon: a sickle. Much like Kiriyama, Mitsuko is more than happy to harvest weapons from her victims; indeed, Mitsuko kills just as many people with firearms as she does with her signature weapon. Yet the sickle is inextricable from Mitsuko’s personality and demeanor. On one level, a sickle is essentially a hand-wielded scythe, the weapon most commonly associated with Death in the west. However, a sickle is also a gardening tool commonly used by the most famous assassins in Japanese culture. Mitsuko is a ninja.

Not a Naruto-magical transforming, kunai wielding bastardization of what a ninja is, no: Mitsuko is a real ninja. Actual ninja became notable for being invisible and using whatever tools they had in assassinations. The key to being a ninja was to not be known as a ninja. Mitsuko, by being identified as an elite despite not being elite, unknown by everyone, hiding in plain sight, has all the attributes necessary to be a ninja. Also, much like an actual ninja, Mitsuko is willing to use every tool at her disposal to survive, including using her body to seduce and expose two unwitting victims. Unlike Kiriyama, who literally enters every conflict guns blazing, Mitsuko is willing to run away when she lacks the advantage. Further distinguishing Mitsuko from Kiriyama is the way her kills are displayed. We always know when Kiriyama is about to kill someone: he relishes chasing people down in very obvious displays of physical dominance. By contrast, all but one of Mitsuko’s kills are surprise attacks. Indeed, two of these kills – Chigusa and Kayako – even the audience fails to see coming.

Mitsuko

While these diegetic clues make Mitsuko a more interesting character to watch from a metanarrative standpoint, they are secondary to her guiding philosophy – that which makes her, in my eyes, the true villain of the piece. Her originally stated motivation is “Why not kill? Everyone has their issues.” And Mitsuko has plenty of issues. In a very tightly directed flashback, we learn Mitsuko’s mother prostituted her young daughter for money when she was less than ten years old; Mitsuko responded to the threat of rape by pushing her attacker down the stairs and breaking his neck. Yet the victimization never stopped. Mitsuko is constantly attacked and humiliated by girls higher on the social hierarchy. All her attempts to form empathetic connections with her peers go ignored. Thus, rather than suffering from a complete lack of empathy – as is the case for Kiriyama – Mitsuko actively learns to hate others. Kiriyama is guided by insanity, Mitsuko by malice. Kiriyama has no purpose; killing is a byproduct of his actions. Mitsuko does have a purpose: nothingness. Whereas destruction is good to Kiriyama because it is destruction, destruction is good to Mitsuko because it is anathema to being.

Mitsuko is a nihilist. “No one is going to save you; that’s just life.”

While Mitsuko’s mindset emerges from her traumatic background, her character and behavior are best seen as the logical conclusion of the Program’s rules. Unlike every other character, Kiriyama included, Mitsuko follows all the rules of the game perfectly. She keeps killing people at a steady rate until the final night. She conserves her resources. She holds no qualms about killing. Indeed, she rather takes pleasure in ending each life she does. She revels in toying with Megumi before killing her. She tricks Hirono, one of the few girls able to manipulate Mitsuko’s traumatic past, by appealing to the popular girl’s vanity. She seduces the perverts in her class before slitting their throats, even symbolically stealing Chigusa’s murder of Niida from her by taking claim of his corpse. She gleefully guns down Chigusa while no one is watching. In her final murder, she rejects the existence of love; as Kotohiki asks “what am I supposed to do now” after accidentally killing Hiroki, Mitsuko tells her to die before shooting her through the heart.

Mitsuko is a perfect foil to the heroic forces of Battle Royale. All of the heroes who survive the three days of Battle Royale – Shuya, Noriko, and Kawada – stand for ideals that are difficult to maintain within a state of war: principle, hope, and pragmatism. None of these elements would survive without each other. Only one character in the movie is single-mindedly dedicated to destroying them all: Mitsuko. Sure, Kiriyama might threaten the virtues, but the three protagonists are eventually able to take him down without immediately losing anyone. Against Mitsuko, however, they stand little chance. In what I consider the most important scene in the movie, Noriko – the film’s embodiment of hope – runs into Mitsuko by accident. It’s a terrifying scene, as we know Mitsuko is only too happy to kill Noriko. Indeed, Noriko is the only character Mitsuko ever insults, calling her “ugly.” The metaphor is all the more pointed considering that nihilism's most horrifying power is its ability to disavow and destroy hope. Noriko survives only because the Program itself symbolically declares her off-limits, as Kitano shows up and scares Mitsuko away. Had anyone else been there, Noriko and our hopes would be dead. It is also notable that Mitsuko is an original member of Class B whereas Kiriyama is not: she thus is an evil found within the world rather than one imposed from beyond it.

That said, if Mitsuko is the true villain, why is she not the final boss? After all, Kiriyama kills her in one final villain versus villain brawl. Is the film stating that Kiriyama’s psychopathy is more evil than Mitsuko’s nihilism? I say no. Mitsuko falls to Kiriyama because no one else is able kill her, yet the film wishes to reject her philosophy. After all, if nihilism seeks to destroy everything, eventually it must destroy itself. The only thing that would remain after Mitsuko killed everyone would be the atmosphere of chaos her nihilism inspires: all that would remain is Kiriyama. Mitsuko, in seeking to destroy everything, must destroy herself. Even so, Mitsuko puts up an incredible fight: the very best in the entire movie. One by one, she loses each weapon she has stolen in reverse order, dying whilst clutching her scythe and declaring that she only wished not to be a loser. There’s an incredible little moment where Mitsuko thinks she’s impaled Kiriyama only to discover he is wearing a bulletproof vest: a moment of recognition where Mitsuko realizes what her violence has wrought. There’s an implicit acknowledgment that the Kiriyamas of the world exist because of the Mitsukos. In this way is Mitsuko my favorite character in the movie, despite being the most terrifying.

X. The Survivors

So, how do the “winners” of Battle Royale stack up against the opposition? The three protagonists of the film have one distinguishing feature beyond their peers: a robust reason to win beyond selfishness or a desire to circumvent the system. They strive to survive, but not to kill. Nowhere is this characteristic more overt than in the film’s protagonist, Shuya. Unlike every character except Kawada and Mitsuko, Shuya is the only character to face true personal tragedy before entering the Program; his father committed suicide, leaving behind only the message “go for it, Shuya; you can do it, Shuya” on toilet paper. Before the Program, the message had but one meaning, in reference to the final meal Shuya shared with his father: indulge yourself while you can, Shuya. By the game’s end, however, Shuya turns around the meaning of the phrase to an encouragement of victory.

Shuya

However, Shuya does not murder to win. Indeed, his only kill – the administrator Kitano – takes place after the Battle Royale is over. Shuya’s strategy for victory instead revolves around embracing a single principleto guide his actions: protect Noriko at all costs to preserve Nobu’s memory. While there are subtle nods to suggest Shuya has some feelings for Noriko, there are no major scenes in which Shuya actually expresses romantic affection or physical attraction to her. Rather, his dedication to protecting her arises almost entirely from his promise to the deceased Nobu. He defends her because it is simply the right thing to do. Shuya then follows through on this promise with several acts of self-sacrifice. He grapples with Oki to prevent him from hacking Noriko to ribbons. He draws Motobuchi’s fire away from Noriko. He hurls himself, completely unarmed, at Kiriyama in order to distract him from attacking Noriko. He drags his way back to Noriko and Kawada after getting separated from them, despite literally breaking an arm and a leg in the process. And he finally kills Kitano when he threatens Noriko with a fake firearm and demands that she kill him, preventing Noriko from becoming a murderer. Shuya acknowledges that, unlike most every other member of his class, he is weak. He cannot kill. However, by embracing his weakness, Shuya ends up the most inspirational character of the movie.

It’s thus fitting that Shuya’s weapon that he receives in the beginning of the movie is a pot lid. In battle, a pot lid is terrible. It serves a mere cursory defensive function against melee weapons, and it can only last one good blow. Indeed, Shuya loses his pot lid after his very first fight in the tournament. However, just as a pot lid is very weak as a weapon, it is excellent at preparing food. It retains heat within a pot and keeps the food inside moist and flavorful: unlike the other weapons of Battle Royale, it’s a creative force. Shuya stands for the notion that mankind, by holding to promises and honor, can survive the state of war.

Noriko holds perhaps a more important function: she is man’s reason for striving. Noriko largely serves as the embodiment of all that is good in the world of Battle Royale. Despite being picked upon as “ugly” by most of her female peers, Noriko demonstrates a level of caring none surpass. She tends Shuya’s wounds several times throughout the movie and does her best to restore Kawada back to his humanity after winning his first Battle Royale. She even manages to speak to Mitsuko and Kitano with honesty and kindness in her inflection. The most telling episode of her goodness actually takes place before the Battle Royale; unlike every other student in her class, Noriko continued to go to school in spite of the student protests. Thus, she is essentially the only member of her classmates to be without original sin. (Yes, Christianity is not the dominant religion in Japan, and the notion of “original sin” is an interpretation I have imposed; however, the movie does place a halo around Noriko’s head in one of the most important props of the final act, so I think my interpretation is justifiable.)

Noriko’s weapon is a pair of binoculars. Unlike Shuya, she never ends up using them to much effective use; the only time I can recall her using them is when she witnesses the murders of Kusaka and Yukiko. However, the binoculars do suggest a quality Noriko possesses that no other character shares: foresight. Noriko is incredibly sensitive to the emotional needs of others. From taking the opportunity when she first meets with Shuaya to apologize for Nobu’s death, rather than taking advantage of the opportunity to spend time with her crush, to giving Kawada hope that he could find redemption in the final moments of his previous Battle Royale, to comforting Kitano – a man who unrepentantly murders children – as he shuffles off the mortal coil, Noriko never fails to see what is most important to each person. That level of perceptiveness offers hope that mankind can be empathetic and move past its violent tendencies.

Noriko

Noriko’s characterization is not without its problems. Yet again, the main female character in a movie serves as little more than a symbol for hope and purity rather than having a clearly defined arc of her own. Besides being nice to other people, Noriko does not end up doing much useful within the plot. It is also quite easy to see Noriko as the Madonna to Mitsuko’s whore. While I do think the excellent characterization of Mitsuko prevents Battle Royale from adopting an entirely sexist narrative (and the film definitely passes the Bechdel test), I cannot help but find the main female protagonist lacking. Noriko is an excellent symbol… but she’s not a great character.

The last of the three to survive is the film’s primary antihero: Kawada. A former winner of the Program, Kawada made his way through the game while steadfastly adhering to his love of one of his classmates. The two were the final survivors, yet Kawada’s love shot him in the stomach; he shot back, killing her. When Kawada’s love died with a smile on her face, Kawada completely lost himself: how could she continue to have hope even after she betrayed his love and lost her life? Kawada thus returns to win the game again and hopefully find answers.

Throughout the game, Kawada adopts the most pragmatic mindset of any character in the movie. Kawada uses a shotgun that he pre-selected before the Program begins: accordingly, he must pick his shots carefully, as the shotgun takes time to reload. He also only ever kills when he needs to: his only kills in the movie are Motobuchi and a completely blind Kiriyama. He also plays an incredibly cynical long-game, intending to keep Shuya and Noriko – two people with utterly useless weapons – alive until the end, so as to ensure an easy victory. Though Kawada does not go through with this plan, his cynical outlook could very well have assured him the win, had Kawada not had a change of heart.

Kawada

Kawada’s pragmatism arises from his quest. Towards the beginning of the game, Kawada instructs Shuya and Noriko to kill themselves should they wish to be spared from killing. Having killed the only person he ever loved, Kawada knows killing within the Program is inherently evil; should one wish to avoid that evil, suicide is the most practical option. Kawada would rather Shuya and Noriko be spared from the dilemma his love once faced; he is disturbed by that final smile. Only when Noriko reveals that this final smile was an act of love does Kawada begin to let go of his purely pragmatic mindset and develop an altruistic personality. Kawada learns that it is better to die at the hands of another while protecting something beautiful rather than survive as a murderer. Had his lover chosen to do so, she could have shot him fatally; rather, she intentionally gave him a nonlethal wound so he would kill her, ensuring that he would survive the Program and that his collar would not explode. Kawada thus does the same for Shuya and Noriko. Even though he sustains fatal injuries long before the very end of the movie, Kawada holds on to see Shuya and Noriko to safety; he perishes protecting others.

All of these characters stand for moral values beyond mere selfishness and self-preservation. Moreover, none of these characters could have won the battle royale on their own. Had it not been for Shuya’s protection, Oki would have slashed Noriko to ribbons. Without Noriko’s nurturing spirit, both Shuya and Kawada would have died from blood loss. If not for Kawada, Kiriyama would have finished off both Noriko and Shuya. The combination of principle, hope, and pragmatism is what creates a truly moral agent within the state of war. Thus, as violent as this movie about children is, there’s an earnestness buried within all that blood and gore.

Battle Royale certainly isn't perfect. Towards the back end of the movie, the administrator of the program gets personally involved with the characters and starts to play favorites, disrupting the allegory in a manner that feels unnatural. The concluding scenes with Kitano aren't particularly compelling, even when the film calls back to earlier flashbacks. The ending credits are also full of deleted scenes that can distract from the overall experience. And, as noted, a couple of the deaths are too orgiastically violent for their own good. But, when considered on the whole, Battle Royale contains a lot of symbolic heft within all its child murder. It's a film as rewarding to watch as it is disturbing to watch.

I give Battle Royale a 9.0/10.

Movie Review #28: Jurassic World - Fallen Kingdom

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)
Director: J.A. Bayona
Writer(s): Derek Connolly, Colin Trevorrow
Starring: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rafe Spall

Don't see it.

I apologize for the blunt introduction. After all, this is a Jurassic Park movie: one expects the review to chock-full of dinosaur puns and hyperbolistic language. I'm here to tell you: no. This review is not fun. This review is a serious deconstruction of one of the WORST movies I've seen in theaters in a long time. This movie makes The Greatest Showman - a movie that normalized and valorized a racist, prejudicial con artist - look good by comparison. One might anticipate the standard movie critic's D+/C- grade, establishing the expectation that this is a bad, clumsy movie that one shouldn't see but might be worth a laugh. Perhaps this is a perfectly decent "so bad it's good movie" - audio-visual Cheetos, if you will. It's my unfortunate task to inform you Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom is none of these things. It is a soul-draining, brain-rotting mess of stupidity that actively harms the mind once one applies but a synapse of critical thought to it. Moreover, it's decidedly unenjoyable to watch: a two-and-a-half slog of non-interactive, video game-paced, special effects mumbo jumbo, a barrage of action set pieces and CGI-blurs at once incomprehensibly dull and tonally confused. All of these negative attributes lead to a conclusion so morally nihilistic and antithetical to the spirit and moral of the original Jurassic Park novel and film that any hope I had for the future of this franchise disintegrated into ash before my eyes. This is a singularly unpleasant film even within the Jurassic Park series: a franchise, mind you, that has only ever had one good movie in it. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom manages to achieve a new low, a feat I thought impossible given the misogynistic, patronizing, and spiritually vacant tone of Jurassic World. This is a truly bad film; don't see it.

Three years after the events of Jurassic World, InGen has been sued out of existence thanks to civil class action lawsuits on the behalf of the thousands of families who lost loved ones in a genetic abomination-driven rampage. On Isla Nublar, the location of the now abandoned Jurassic World, the once dormant volcano has now become active, with an imminent eruption threatening the extinction of all the remaining dinosaurs in the park. Congress, for once using its penchant for inactivity for the good of mankind, opts to let the God-forsaken products of human hubris die. However, Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) and Owen (Chris Pratt) from the last movie are determined to save the dinosaurs, especially Owen's Deinonychus best friend, Blue (yes, I'm using the accurate dinosaur name instead of the film's erroneous Velociraptor designation; I was a dinosaur kid back in the day). They, along with their quirky computer geek friend Franklin (Justice Smith) and their "paleoveteranarian" friend Zia (Danielle Pineda), go on an expedition financed by John Hammond's former partner, Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell) and his assistant, Eli (Rafe Spall). However, there's a conspiracy afoot, as a cabal of evil arms dealers and geneticists from across the globe have acquired the DNA of the Indominus rex from the last movie and have created a new, military-grade successor: the Indoraptor. The only one witness to this group's machinations is Lockwood's granddaughter, Maisie (Isabella Sermon). Will our heroes be able to stop the evil arms dealers and save the dinosaurs? Waste your time and money and find out.

A warning in advance: I will be spoiling the entire movie in this review. The film's innumerable failings cannot be properly described or analyzed without thoroughly examining the details and implications of its conclusion. This involves spoiling many of the film's so-called "plot twists." If you find these spoilers offensive to the hard work of filmmakers who demand your money... don't fool yourself. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is a studio product: the amount of money from your ticket that actually benefits the hard-working special effects artists and writers on these projects is next-to-nothing. Your ticket finances a defective corporate product and fosters a cinematic culture in which films as bad as Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom are deemed acceptable. Should you wish to stop reading this review and see the movie anyway as part of some pro-laissez faire, anti-"soft censorship" political movement, I can't stop you. I enjoy illuminating the merits and faults of film-making, and it's my task to extract whatever I gained - for good or for ill - from films and effectively convey insight to an audience. In the case of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, I cannot do so without spoilers. I'd also emphasize that I'm "spoiling" nothing: the film itself is spoilt and rotten. It is nigh impossible for me to make make it worse. Even if we adopt the purely figurative meaning of "spoilers" here, there's very little to spoil. This is a Jurassic Park movie. You know the story beats: man thinks himself able to play God, God says no, raptors chase a kid, the T. rex eats a guy in a suit, and John Williams plays us out. This is Jurassic Park; it is not Citizen Kane.

Let's start by talking the real reason people are going to watch Jurassic Park: the visual effects. Normally, I'd begin with discussing characters and story, but Jurassic Park has rarely been about characters and story: they're the original film's greatest weakness. Rather, the franchise has always marketed itself on having top-of-the-line special effects. It is to my dismay, however, to report that Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom has the worst visuals in the entire Jurassic Park franchise outside of Jurassic Park III. It's not that the CGI in this film is any less complex than that of the last film: indeed, there are many more skin textures and animated features on the dinosaurs as compared to Jurassic World. The real problem here is lighting. As a result of crappy lighting and limited computer processing power, the look of these dinosaurs is incredibly spotty depending on the set piece. The film's opening T. rex sequence looks especially bad, as the computer didn't seem able to effectively process the effect rain would have on the T-rex CGI model. The original Jurassic Park used practical effects shortcuts to work around this, but the new film - almost entirely CGI-based - fails to properly show what a T. rex would look like running in the rain. The result is a jagged, choppy model that looks wholly unappealing. Other times, dinosaurs are improperly lit or revealed through reflective surfaces, as the computer once again tries to fit in objects that aren't present in those surfaces. A great number of scenes in this film take place in a mansion full of mirrors and shiny vases, so it's easy for hiccups to appear. Unfortunately, they do appear. The only animated part of any of these dinosaurs that's consistently well-animated is the inside of therapods' mouths: you'll see plenty of them if you see the movie.

The design of the new dino villain, the Indoraptor, also makes zero sense. The Indoraptor is designed with military effectiveness in mind: it should be, by all accounts, an improvement upon the Indominus rex. Unfortunately, its biological features are preposterous. The creature has a sinuous, practically serpentine body built for ambushes and stealth warfare, yet the creature somehow has giant arms, four fingers, toe claws, and a head the size of an Allosaurus. The creature is also HUGE: there's no way it could stalk anything without giving itself away through body heat alone. A creature like this only needs one killing method - pouncing and ambushes. All of the other teeth and claws are just cosmetics. Speaking of cosmetics, the Indoraptor also has a bright yellow stripe on its sides, because apparently ambush predators should have bright coloring so as to inform its prey that it looks "fabulous." All in all, the creature doesn't look as threatening as any of the real dinosaurs or even as threatening as the preposterous Indominus rex from the last movie, and its design does not cohere with its stated narrative function. Rather, the Indoraptor is designed as it is for an entirely different function: selling model figurines to elementary school students. Buy a six-piece chicken nuggets from McDonalds and get your free ludicrous dinosaur model, equipped with two moving parts and a goofy-ass smile. (Yes, the dinosaur does in fact smile in the movie. Consider my suspension of disbelief settled in the flask.)

The flaws in the Indoraptor design approach the issue of plot-hole nitpicking. More so than any other major film franchise, the Jurassic Park franchise opens itself up to severe criticism of its ludicrous plot details, contrivances, and errors. Even within the realm of science fiction, its logical jumps and gaps leave much to be desired insofar as suspension of disbelief is concerned. All four Jurassic Park sequels would have no plots were the characters to display the slightest amount of critical thinking. Mocking the plot errors in this film would be normally counterproductive to good film criticism, turning this blog post into an awful display of pseudo-comedy like CinemaSins. I could talk about characters somehow surviving being covered within a pyroclastic flow, but it would be a waste of time. However, I do believe a good number of these errors cannot be ignored, as they lend themselves into a discussion of the broader thematic and structural failings of the film. While I can bemoan a silly plot contrivance - such as the entire second half of the movie being sparked by one moronic henchman's desire to open the Indoraptor cage - for being silly, pointing out this fact teaches nothing. Other errors, on the other hand, must be addressed.

For example, our main characters, Claire and Owen. The Jurassic Park films have never been good at developing characters beyond simplistic, lesson-learning arcs, but they are at least competent at using general stereotypes to make us care about certain individuals. Jurassic World did not do a particularly good job of this, as Claire and Owen are basically stand-ins for classic yet noxious tropes: the careerist woman who discovers that her only way to be "truly good" is to adopt a maternal role and modes of physical violence, and the dashing action hero who knows better than everyone and always gets the girl regardless of the pair's lack of compatibility. However, in the beginning of this movie, the two characters have somehow completely flip-flopped. Claire, a woman whose marketing campaign was almost entirely responsible for creating the Indominus rex, a woman who willingly tampered with animal genetics in order to please the masses, has become a left-wing "save the dinosaurs" activist with Congressional connections. Putting aside the fact that Claire would be serving 20 to life for multiple counts of felony murder for her actions in the last movie and would be a social pariah within modern corporate shaming culture, this character switch is all too sudden. Certainly, Claire adopted some drastically different behaviors from her normal corporate-driven mindset in the last movie, but a switch like this is a complete about-face from what she was. It's almost as if Richard Nixon turned into Frank Zappa. Owen's change is subtler but no less bizarre. While one would think he'd take up the activist role instead of Claire, he's instead building a house for himself like Little Bill Daggett in Unforgiven, permitting the dinosaurs to die until he watches some old footage of his best friend, Blue. As was the case in the last film, our perfect action hero never learns anything, but he's neither dashing nor confident in this film. He's just... there.

More insulting still are the film's supposed character arcs. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom repeats the exact same romantic subplot from the last movie. Claire and Owen have dated and broken up off screen, with a few passing references being made to the break-up as cheap exposition. They bond over a child and end up kissing in the end of the movie. No growth, no change, just titillation. The villains are one-note suits who get a few speeches in about the heroes' hypocrisy before being quickly eaten by dinosaurs. The one corporate character who has a heart dies as soon as his arc is completed, removing any hope of real growth from occurring in the story. The child character never changes, because all children in Jurassic Park sequels are saints whose actions are beyond reproach. The geeky character who was afraid of everything in the beginning of the movie conquers his fears by unleashing a dinosaur into the villains' lair, effectively becoming a murderer. No one cares. No one learns. No one grows. Insofar as films are a medium of human empathy, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is an utter failure.

Even when Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom tries to emotionally resonate with its audience, it completely fails. The film's emotional center, so to speak, is the Brachiosaurus from the first movie. It's the first dinosaur, after all, audiences ever beheld with wonder. When the characters first arrive on Isla Nublar, it's the first dinosaur they encounter, so as to mirror the first film. Thus, as the island is destroyed by a giant volcano, it is the Brachiosaurus that bids goodbye to our heroes as they are ushered away with a cadre of kidnapped dinosaurs. We then watch as the Brachiosaurus walks up to the dock, following the ship, slowly being surrounded by flames and falling into ash. Solemn, somber music plays. The characters start crying. A light from the heavens shines down as if to cry, "Oh the cruelty of man! Woe be unto him who would destroy such beautiful creatures!" It was at this moment that every single person in my movie theatre burst into hysterics and started laughing his or her pants off. The film just tried to portray Brachiosaurus, a giant prehistoric reptile the size of a small skyscraper, as an analogue to Jesus Christ - a narrative conceit so innately preposterous that one cannot help but laugh upon seeing it. The imagery of this scene alone is enough to completely undercut the tone of the film.

The film is also tone-deaf and incomprehensibly paced. The film races from action set-piece to action set-piece so quickly that one practically can't make sense of the plot, thin as it is. The first scene has a legitimately effective scare involving the Tylosaurus and a submersible that never surfaces, but the film never establishes itself. It quickly leaps from pure horror, to disaster-movie camp with explosions and dying dinosaurs, to techno-thriller, to espionage film, to action blow-out, to Freddy Krueger-inspired fever dream. The mood is so disorienting that one gets muted to the film's mood  and atmosphere. The film's most legitimately effective jump-scare is a fake-out involving a ten-year-old girl. Were I to properly characterize the mood of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, I'd probably be best of describing it as a high-resolution version of the Dino Crisis video game series that one isn't allowed to play. One would be better off spending one's time watching a Let's Play of the original Dino Crisis on YouTube, as one would at least be vicariously enjoying oneself through another's gaming pleasure. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom doesn't know what it wants to be as a film: as a result, it ends up feeling like an incoherent blob of brainless CGI set-pieces.

All of this awful filmmaking - the clumsy special effects, the bad script, the incoherent plot structure, the rushed pacing, the terrible characters - is secondary, however. Let's talk about the true reason Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is awful: its theme and moral center. Believe it or not, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom wants to tell us something. Unfortunately, it offers just about the most hypocritical and offensive message it could possibly relate. Let's plunge right into this pile.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom has a disturbing habit of raising very important moral questions and then abandoning them with action scenes. The most alarming of these is the issue of human cloning. It's long been an uncomfortable undercurrent of the Jurassic Park franchise that the same genetic sequencing techniques used to resurrect dinosaurs could be used to bring people back from the dead through cloning. In Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, this suggestion finally comes to fruition, when we discover that the little ball of "preciousness" that is this film's child character is, in fact, a clone of her dead "mother." The film announces this development as a major plot twist, as it's undeniably a shocking, troubling point. What can be said of the free will of this girl if she is nothing more than a copy of someone already dead? Is she truly human? What legislation should be passed to deal with this new technology? These are deeply troubling questions that strike at the core of our human understanding. How does Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom address them? Simple: interrupt the twist with a giant dinosaur attack, and never mention the issue again.

That level of moral irresponsibility permeates all of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. The film raises deeply troubling issues that deserve complex conversation and nuance, all before smashing through them with dinosaur action scenes. The movie has no understanding of its horrific implications. Instead, the child just runs off with Owen and Claire at the end of the movie, with all of her legal guardians being dead. This, for those individuals who still had operating brain cells after watching the movie, is an act of child abduction that the film just brushes off. We're given to believe these two romantically incompatible, emotionally volatile, violent, unstable adults who now have a plan to trot the globe trying to stop evil geneticists from using dinosaur super-weapons on the public are somehow going to be good substitute parents. The film makes us worry about tons of side issues and useless side characters when every parent in the audience should be making an Amber Alert call. And let's not forget that this isn't an ordinary child, but a clone child aware of her existence as a clone that the federal government will have no idea how to deal with. How is this child going to deal with the trauma of knowing, if not for scientific meddling, she would never have existed? This is a huge moral blindspot that the film willfully brings up and then abandons!

Then, there's the main message of the movie. The Jurassic Park story is a very basic allegory for man's willingness to meddle with the environment. The message: don't do it. Nature will come back to bite you. One can very easily analogize the dinosaurs of the book and film to oil consumption, carbon emissions, and deforestation: should one upset the balance of the world, its side effects upon humanity will be apocalyptic. Should one upset the balance, one should do whatever one can to correct that balance. Save your fellow humans from dangerous dinosaurs. Don't interact with the dinosaurs. Keep the dinosaurs isolated and contained. Limit the proliferation of dinosaurs. And, yes, kill the dinosaurs. They're not supposed to be here: let them die. This is the moral Dr. Malcolm presents at the beginning of the movie, and the audience is properly given to believe that he is correct. However, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom presents the exact opposite answer: once you've inserted the dinosaurs back into the gene pool, let them run free!

The characters have a big moral dilemma at the end of the movie where they have the chance to let all of the dinosaurs die a second time, this time without the interference of evil dinosaur smugglers. Of course, the film analogizes this to human beings being trapped in a gas chamber; no exaggeration here: the dinosaurs are locked in a small room being filled with poison gas. It's as if they're trying to analogize dinosaurs - long extinct animals that had their time in the sunlight - to Holocaust victims. That's a level of profound disrespect for the dead. Dinosaurs aren't human beings: they're an open threat the world's ecosystem. And yet, we are supposed to feel bad that the dinosaurs are dying, because, according to this film, every child should have the right to see a dinosaur. And just when the adults are about to let the dinosaurs die as they should, the little kid "saves the day." The film seems to falsely equate the extinction of the dinosaurs with the extinction of living endangered species. The problem is that dinosaurs aren't endangered species: they're invasive species. They're cane toads, house cats, and wild dogs. They're elite predators and herbivores whose mere presence in the modern ecology would trigger a mass extinction. But, all because some whiny children want to see dinosaurs, the audience is given to believe that letting the dinosaurs loose is a GOOD thing. The film's true message: when humans screw up the environment, don't try to fix it by limiting the scope of your ecologically inept actions - double down. I can hardly think of a theme more antithetical to the original Jurassic Park if I tried.

These theme problems engulf this film in the flames it deserves. Sure, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is not as over-the-top dumb as the last Jurassic Park movie. Sure, it doesn't have a cringe-inducing murder sequence of an innocent female character. Sure, it has one good scene in the very beginning of the movie. But those elements cannot excuse mediocre to laughable visuals, poor acting, sloppy dialogue, askew pacing, horrendous plot contrivances, and an absolutely abhorrent message. This is one of those films that gets almost everything wrong. Moreover, it's not even so bad it's good: it's a high budget, Hollywood production full of cynical clichés that seeks to milk your money and time. This film is two and a half hours too long. I would rather this film had been dumber than it was, if only I could have laughed at it more. Instead, we have a morally empty collection of special effects and storytelling vacuity that might as well have been written by Michael Bay. This is filmmaking by soulless committee, with not an ounce of genuine humanity on the screen. To put it as Dr. Ian Malcolm would, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom "is one big pile of s***."

I give Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom a 0.9/10.