42 high school students are taken to a small isolated island with a map, food and various arms. They have to fight each other for three days long until the last one remains. Could you kill your best friend?
Thinking they are about to enjoy a field trip, a class of 9th graders calmly boards a bus that brings them face-to-face with the worst instincts of mankind. Director Kinji Fukasaku decided, at the age of 70, to make a film warning young people not to trust adults. The message may be obvious, but its delivery is chilling. It's a nightmare teenage version of Survivor, a deadly game with no talk show appearances awaiting the victor. And your host for the carnage is the stone-faced Takeshi Kitano (Beat Takeshi), a past teacher of the students.
Kitano explains the rules. Each student is given a backpack with minimal supplies and one weapon (some of which appear completely useless). They are given a limited time to kill each other off; failure to do so will result in their own termination, via bomb-enabled collars affixed to their necks. The disbelieving teens are shocked into action when Kitano demonstrates the deadly force of the neck collars, and the murdering quickly begins.Some students band together, some try to figure out how to avoid killing anyone, and some give in eagerly to their basest instincts in order to exact revenge.
The question changes from "Who will survive?" to "Who wants to, when the price is so high?"
Special Agent Matti
Like Series 7: the contenders, Battle royale is a piss-take on Reality TV game shows, however, it has a distinctly Japanese flavour, which shouldn't surprise anyone because it's a Japanese film. The good part is that it pits teenagers against each other rather than adults, who would have some emotional and practical experience to draw on. Other than that, it's full of weird shiitake.
R 18+
114 minutes (1:54 minutes)
Film: 20 March 2003 - Melbourne
Film: 1 May 2003 - Sydney