By Joshua Cornelius

Brutal Honesty: Battle Royale was easily the longest, hardest month we’ve had since forming The Film League.  Some of that had to do with the intrusion of Real Life (not an excuse, but a causality), but more about the fact that Battle Royale is particularly up front about its intentions.

One thing I’ve found, through writing about film for this site and others, is that modern films don’t necessarily hold up to meticulous scrutiny, or have often already been so vigorously dissected that the films intents are laid bare for anyone to see.  Many times, this is done by the filmmakers themselves in interviews or on commentary tracks that are recorded often before the film has even been released in theaters.  The director tells you his or her intentions directly, leaving little ambiguity, and the disc for the movie is dropped and out the door just a month or two after the film has seen theatrical release.  There it enjoys a few weeks of additional success, and the film begins the long slow slide to the middle-land of forgotten mediocrity.

The only challenging films that seem to gain acceptance are coupled with a copious amount of sex, violence or whatever X factor type of foreplay mass audiences seem to require in order to metabolize the complex, intellectual themes that come along with the bundle.  Battle Royale is analogous to Fight Club, in that way.  People have hollowed out and simplified the themes of both films over the years, removed them from the context in which they were conceived, and imbued them with something a bit more personal and timely.  These perennial film are renewed and refreshed time and again, re-examined and placed in the context of the current day.

I would not at all be surprised to hear of a Battle Royale remake to coincide with whatever angst-ridden new wave of youth will descend upon America in the wake of our great long depression.  The hook is simple; children live in a world with a bleak future, oppressed by the compromised values of a nation run by selfish, impotent bureaucrats.  They are imposed upon by taxes and restrictions, designed to resurrect a failing empire, shifting the weight of burden for a century of bad decisions to a generation too numbed and blind to understand.  As the ship sinks, the youth of tomorrow find themselves at the bottom, gasping for air, as the outgoing generation enjoy the Last Reward that the system was designed to afford for the republic.

Battle Royale is the kind of film that will mean something different to the people of any nation, place or time.  It’s themes are so universal that I’d venture to say you could take the film back even hundreds of years and the film would hold up.  What Kinji Fukasaku saw in Koushun Takami’s novel has everything to do with the hatred of government Kinji experienced post World War II as a teenager; a war that he was forced to participate in and did so willingly as he was mislead by a government that twisted the wills of its people to war.  It means everything and nothing that Fukasaku’s, great last cinematic gasp was a neatly packaged bundle of commercially palatable entertainment with one final, universally recognizable message:

REVOLT.

Takeshi Kitano’s painting that appears in the film.