Battle Royale

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Movie
German title Battle Royale
Original title Batoru Rowaiaru
Battleroyale-logo.svg
Country of production Japan
original language Japanese
Publishing year 2000
length approx. 113 minutes
Age rating FSK 18
Rod
Director Kinji Fukasaku
script Kenta Fukasaku
production Kenta Fukasaku
Kinji Fukasaku
Chie Kobayashi
Kimio Kataoka
Toshio Nabeshima
music Masamichi Amano
camera Katsumi Yanagishima
cut Hirohide Abe
occupation
chronology

Successor  →
Battle Royale II: Requiem

Subtitles after a bloody scene which announces the recent deaths of a boy and two girls, with 28 remaining students

Battle Royale ( Japanese バ ト ル ・ ロ ワ イ ア ル , Batoru Rowaiaru ) is a Japanese feature film from 2000 based on the novel of the same name by Kōshun Takami . Kinji Fukasaku directed the controversial drama and his son Kenta wrote the script.

The film takes place in a dystopian Japan of the future, in which school classes of middle school students are selected every year to kill each other in a state-arranged death game. The film deals with the implementation of such a game and the socio-psychological actions that result from it.

action

The introduction of the film explains that at the turn of the millennium, under the pressure of high unemployment and juvenile delinquency, the “Millennium Education Reform”, or “BR Law” for short, was passed. In the following scene, a reporter reports on the outcome of the last "game" to a great media rush. A blood-smeared girl who is escorted by soldiers is shown as a survivor.

Class 3-B (corresponds to class 9B in the German school system ) of the Shiroiwa Middle School closes the end of compulsory schooling with an apparent excursion, during which, however, all students on the bus are anesthetized. When they come to, they find themselves in a shabby classroom on a deserted island, wearing metal collars that they cannot remove. Kitano, a former teacher of the class, walks in with soldiers and explains dryly that the "lesson of the day" for the students is to kill each other except for one survivor, and that anything goes. A video explains the rules to the students in more detail. The collars are used to determine the whereabouts of the students and can be detonated remotely from the control center. Several times a day the teacher will announce “danger zones”, in which everyone who is there will be killed by igniting the collar. If there is no “winner” after three days, all collars will detonate. In the course of the sequence, Kitano kills two students with his own hands. Each student is then called individually and leaves the room with a randomly chosen weapon.

Soon after the game started, some students committed suicide. Others kill their comrades in revenge for previous arguments, some more band together or make confessions of love to one another. The psychopathic "exchange student" Kazuo Kiriyama comes into possession of a submachine gun and shoots a number of students with it. The cold-blooded student Mitsuko is also determined to emerge as the winner. At regular intervals, Kitano announces the names of the students who have been killed so far and the new danger zones over loudspeakers. Students Shuya Nanahara and Noriko Nakagawa team up to repel attacks and join Shougo Kawada, another exchange student who survived a previous game and claims to know a way out of the game. A group of girls got together in the lighthouse, but by mistake they suddenly distrust each other and kill each other in a brutal scene. Another group of boys forms around Shinji Mimura and tries to destroy the control center by hacking the computer system and by bombing it, but is switched off by Kiriyama.

In the end, Kawada succeeds in misleading the control center and ensuring the survival of Nanahara and Nakagawa. Kitano, who is suicidal himself and threatens Nakagawa, is shot by Nanahara. When leaving the island, Kawada dies of his injuries. The end of the film shows Nakagawa and Nanahara on the run, wanted for murder and accessory to murder.

Emergence

Fukasaku Kinji adapted the story from the novel by Kōshun Takami . The book and film show some parallels with Richard Connell's short story The Most Dangerous Game , William G. Golding's Lord of the Flies and Stephen King's Death March . There are also correspondences with the short story The Prize of Peril by the American writer Robert Sheckley , which was the basis for Wolfgang Menge's Das Millionenspiel .

Film music

The film music , mainly composed by Masamichi Amano and recorded by the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra , contains several classic European pieces, such as Dies irae from Giuseppe Verdi's Requiem , the Radetzky March , Johann Strauss ' “ Donauwalzer ”, Franz Schubert's song Auf dem Wasser to sing and the Air from Johann Sebastian Bach's Overture in D major BWV 1068 .

Publications

Publication in Japan

Educators and politicians were offended by the portrayal of violence by fifteen-year-olds on the screen. The film sparked a discussion about violence in films. Attempts to ban the film in Japan were unsuccessful; it started in Japanese cinemas on December 16, 2000 with an R-15 rating, which means that only young people under the age of fifteen could not see the film in theaters. Battle Royale grossed 3.11 billion yen at the box office in Japan , making it the third most successful domestic film of 2001 after the two animated films Spirited Away and Pokémon 3 - Under the Spell of the Unknown .

In 2004 an extended version followed in Japan (called “Special Version” in the accompanying trailer), which is sometimes incorrectly referred to as “ Director's Cut ”. In fact, the shorter theatrical version is the director's preferred version. For the Extended Version, additional scenes were filmed afterwards and some of the existing visual and acoustic revised. During this post-production, film errors were eliminated, scenes of violence were exacerbated by computer-generated blood, and some new plot scenes were incorporated in order to better draw the characters.

Publication in Germany

The film was initially only released in Germany in 2002 in a heavily cut version on DVD. For this version, the SPIO's Legal Commission prepared an opinion on the criminal law harmlessness of the film. The cut version of the film was not approved by the FSK either and was A-indexed on June 30, 2006. Almost half a year earlier on January 31, 2006, the same happened to an uncut version from Hong Kong, which landed on List B.

In 2004 an uncut German version was released in small numbers on Marketing Film on DVD, which was checked by independent lawyers.

Since April 29, 2013, an Austrian release on Blu-Ray from the NSM Records label has been confiscated by the Fulda District Court following an application from February 20, 2013 pursuant to Section 131 StGB . In October 2013, the seizure was lifted at the label's request.

The indexing was also lifted again in February 2017.

Release in the USA

Anchor Bay Entertainment is releasing Battle Royale: The Complete Collection on March 20, 2012 , including Battle Royale II: Requiem , Tokyo International Film Festival 2000 featurette, The Making of ..., the TV commercial: Tarantino version, the Special Edition TV commercial and the Documentation of Battle Royale. Anchor Bay is showing the film in a limited screening from February 24th to May 24th in 20 movie theaters in the USA.

Differences from the book

  • Both Kawada and Kiriyama are exchange students in the film. In the book they are already in class at the beginning.
  • Kiriyama is portrayed in the film as a sociopath who kills with pleasure. In the book he is completely emotionless (he says he flipped a coin to decide whether to take part in the game).
  • The armament of the students is partly different than in the book. In the film, for example, Shuya receives a pot lid, in the book it's a knife. In the book, Kazuo receives a submachine gun, while in the film he steals it from a classmate (his own weapon was a paper fan ).
  • The scene in which Kiriyama Shinji kills Mimura and his friends has been changed for the film: It only ends here when Kazuo is blinded and then killed by Kawada. In the book, however, there are seventeen students left after Mimura's death and Kazuo is unharmed.
  • The program director in the film is the former teacher of the class, Kitano. In the book, the game master is called Kinpatsu Sakamochi and is still unknown to the students.
  • The book is more macabre in some passages. This manifests itself, for example, in the fact that in the book the government officials make “sports bets” on the winner and that the pupils are supposed to write down as a motto that they should kill each other.
  • The student who is shown dead on a stretcher at the beginning of the film is the former teacher of the class in the book who refused to have his class selected for the game. For the Extended Version, the original book was used again and the corpse was presented as that teacher.
  • Likewise, in the film Kitano only has one (metal) knife in his pocket, while in the book Sakamochi carries several very sharp white knives with him and does not collect them after use.

Reviews

“An action film that is as tough as it is cynical, and with Takeshi Kitano as the director, it has found its center stage. An evil satire in the form of a state-sanctioned inhuman game that not only reflects the status of Japanese society, but also generally addresses forms of overstimulation. "

- Film service

“Unfortunately, Fukasaku's figure drawing remains pale throughout. Not only are the individual characters murdered before you get to know them well enough - there are simply too many to want to develop a relationship with. "

- Jens Balzer : Berliner Zeitung

"So the film indirectly asks the famous question: 'What would you do if you knew that you were going to die soon?' Almost every student gives a different answer, in which the character is also revealed: The spectrum of reactions ranges from desperate bewilderment and self-surrender, unbridled belligerence and brutality to, in a double sense, ultimate confessions of love. Most of the young actors, who all worked without stunt doubles, bought their behavior in the perverse situation. In places and in character, it is sometimes overdrawn in such a way that it literally appears hilarious and adds entertainment value. "

- Andreas R. Becker : film starts

Awards

At the 2001 Sitges Festival Internacional de Cinema de Catalunya , the film was nominated for the main prize. At the Yokohama Film Festival 2002, Kou Shibasaki won the supporting actress award for Battle Royale and her portrayal in Go .

At the Japanese Academy Awards 2001, the film was honored in the categories of Best Editing , Best Young Actor ( Tatsuya Fujiwara and Aki Maeda ) and Most Popular Film . He was also nominated for Best Picture , Best Director , Best Screenplay , Best Actor (Tatsuya Fujiwara), Best Music, and Best Sound .

Blue Ribbon Awards received Battle Royale for Best Picture and Tatsuya Fujiwara for Best Newcomer .

Continuation and remake

The 2003 sequel, completed by the son of Kinji Fukasakus, who died of cancer while filming, is called Battle Royale II: Requiem . Survivors from the previous BRs formed the Wild Seven terrorist group .

A remake was announced for 2008 and should be produced by Neal Moritz ( The-Fast-and-the-Furious series) and Roy Lee . After the themed The Hunger Games ran successfully in the cinema, producer Roy Lee said that a remake of Battle Royale was no longer being considered, as the broad (American) audience would think that Battle Royale was just a free rider. A remake is possible in ten years' time to present the film to a new generation.

After the remake in theatrical form had been discarded, the American broadcaster The CW discussed one in the form of a television series. In January 2013, the broadcaster announced that a request to this effect regarding the rights to the book had not yielded any results and that corresponding plans would not be pursued further.

Manga

From November 2000 to 2005, a manga adaptation by Masayuki Taguchi in Japan appeared in the manga magazine Young Champion published by Akita Shoten . The chapters have been summarized in 15 edited volumes.

The work has been published in English by Tokyopop , in French by Soleil and Spanish by Editorial Ivréa and has also been translated into Italian and Portuguese. The work was also published in German in November 2008. The German edition comprises the 15 volumes in 5 edited volumes, all of which have already been published.

In 2011 another manga appeared in the same magazine called Battle Royale: Tenshitachi no Kokkyō ( バ ト ル ・ ロ ワ イ ア ル 天使 た ち の 国境 ), written by Kōshun Takami and drawn first by Mioko Ōnishi and then by Yōhei Oguma. The nine chapters have been summarized in an anthology.

literature

  • Ikurō Takano: 仁義 な き バ ト ル ・ ロ ワ イ ア ル(Jingi naki batoru rowaiaru / Battle Royale: Without Honor or Humanity), ISBN 4-7572-0810-3
  • Kenkyū Iinkai: バ ト ル ・ ロ ワ イ ア ル 特別 篇 最終 攻略 ガ イ ド ブ ッ ク(Batoru rowaiaru tokubetsühlen saishū kōryaku gaidobukku / Battle Royale Complete Guidebook), ISBN 4-04-853361-4
  • Kōshun Takami, Battle Royale Production Committee ( Battle Royale Seisaku Iinkai ): バ ト ル ・ ロ ワ イ ア ル ・ イ ン サ イ ダ(Batoru rowaiaru insaidā / BRI: Battle royale insider), ISBN 4-87233-552-X
  • Jay McRoy: Japanese horror cinema. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu 2005, ISBN 0-8248-2899-2
  • Miriam Rohde: The political dimension of Fukasaku Kinji's feature film Battle Royale. In: Nachrichten der Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens , 77, 1, 2007, pp. 49-68, ISSN  0016-9080

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Eiren.org
  2. ↑ schnittberichte.com
  3. ↑ Report on the confiscation of schnittberichte.com; Retrieved April 29, 2013
  4. ↑ Battle Royale - BPjM announces deletion of the list
  5. ↑ DVD / Blu-ray info: “Battle Royale,” “Theater Bizarre,” etc. , Fangoria from January 8, 2012
  6. ^ Anchor Bay Takes Battle Royale on the Road . Retrieved February 17, 2012
  7. ^ Film Service, Catholic Film Commission for Germany
  8. ↑ Jens Balzer: loveless mass slaughter . In: Berliner Zeitung , June 17, 2002
  9. ↑ filmstarts.de
  10. Jump up ↑ Battle Royale Remake News . Cinematical.com. Retrieved September 12, 2008
  11. ^ Lesson Plan: Kill or Be Killed . In: New York Times (English). Retrieved September 12, 2008
  12. ↑ Jeff Yang: 'Hunger Games' Vs. 'Battle Royale' . In: The Wall Street Journal , March 23, 2012. Retrieved March 24, 2012. 
  13. ^ Carlotta Frommer: "Battle Royale": cult film is to be produced as a series format for US broadcaster CW. In: filmstarts.de. July 27, 2012, accessed January 17, 2013 .
  14. ↑ James Hibberd: 'Battle Royale' TV show not happening at CW. In: Inside TV / ew.com . January 3, 2013, accessed January 17, 2013 .