Battle Royale: Director's Cut (Collector's Edition)
by Kinji Fukasaku
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DVD details
Actor: Chiaki Kuriyama, Takeshi Kitano, Tatsuya FujiwaraDirector: Kinji Fukasaku
DVD: Region Code 0
Audio: English (Subtitled)
Format: AC-3, Color, Director's Cut, Dolby, Full Screen, NTSC
Running Time: 122 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-06-15
Studio: Toei
DVD Reviews of Battle Royale: Director's Cut (Collector's Edition)
DVD Review: good times, good times.
Summary: 4 Stars
fantastic concept. The movie was executed really well, the idea is really original. They do a good job developing the movie and the characters even though some are only there shortly.DVD Review: 3 stars out of 4
Summary: 4 Stars
The Bottom Line:
Far superior to The Condemned, the American quasi-remake/rip-off, Battle Royale takes the inherently-compelling premise of a group of people stuck in a isolated place forced to fight to the death and milks it for all its worth; if you're the type of person who finds that plot description appealing (you know who you are!) then rent or buy this very interesting film.
DVD Review: Depiction of the brutality of the young generation.
Summary: 4 Stars
While some may think of this movie as tawdry entertainment or a bizarre horror flick, it is really not so different from the state of the young today. More at
http://home.comcast.net/~plutarch/Review-BattleRoyale.html
DVD Review: Entertaining, But Not For Book Purists.
Summary: 3 Stars
The book is one of my favorites, and I wanted to give a review for those curious how it handles the epic scale that is the book. The movie wasn't bad, but it could have been handled a little better. One great thing about the book is it's incredible character focus. Each and every one of the 42 students had a background and a story to go with them. Most of them were interconnected either as friends or enemies or even secret crushes (and there were numerous).
And unfortunately, this is where the movie brings its first major issue. Obviously, it can't focus on 42 different characters like the book can, but it didn't even keep the same kind of feel for some of the characters. Shogo, who was my favorite character in the book, was much less mysterious and much less cool in the movie than he was in the book. Hiroki, who was another one of my favorites, had much less of an importance in the movie than the book, and he also lost his best character quality because of his lack of screen time -- his unstoppable devotion. And the mystery of why he was hunting down the second of the two girls was played out much more in the book, though I do think the eventual scene that occurs between them was done quite well in the film. Shinji's character was reduced to almost non-existent, Shuya became incredibly whiny, and any and all background or explanation for Kazuo was just left out. Mitsuko, however, was done rather decently, and there's a scene that's in the director's cut that helps explain to those who haven't read the book a bit about her past (though it is altered quite a bit). On the upside, although they changed the teacher/director character completely from the book to the film (it is not a former teacher or any of that in the book), I like how they added more humanity and even some pity to his character in the film. There was more depth to that character in the film than in the book.
But I think the biggest issue with all of these character changes came from trying to turn a 600+ page book into a two-hour movie. And while those two hours moved by incredibly fast (didn't even feel like two hours), the whole movie felt like how the first fifteen-to-twenty minutes of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire went (200 pages of book crammed into that tiny period). It had a lot of tiny bits of information of characters and scenarios here and there, and those were always fun to catch as a reader of the book, but it still left out or altered too much. For instance, the huge explosion and the scene that leads up to it at the end of the movie occurs around the two-thirds mark of the book... not the climax. And the final showdown with Kazuo was incredibly lame in the movie in comparison to the book... not to mention because of the ending's incredible alteration, one of my favorite (and one of the most powerful, I think) lines in the book wasn't in the movie. I don't want to list all the alterations and discrepancies between the two works, but I will list one more major one that was left out: the anti-government and rock-n-roll stuff. That all played such an enormous part of the book, and besides one scene where you see Shuya playing guitar in a flashback, there's no mention of it whatsoever, and that also took away from the power of the ending, making it more cheesy because it didn't rely back on a major theme.
Now, I didn't hate the movie. I just felt that while the book had a more powerful feeling behind it, the movie was reduced to almost nothing more than a common action movie. But looking at the movie as a movie instead of an adaptation, it was pretty entertaining. It wasn't super gory or anything, and the blood was more along the lines of Quentin Tarantino (you can tell it's fake, and it's in excess at certain moments to make a point). The action was pretty good, though the character development, even looking at it from a non-adaptation standpoint, could have used some work. As I said, at least in the director's cut, the teacher and Mitsuko's characters were handled pretty well. Noriko was similar to how she was in the book (she's more of a symbol than anything), though the danger level of her survival is much more suspenseful in the book (the book plays up on her initial wound and possible infection from it much more than the movie, which takes roughly one minute to tackle that whole issue). Shogo could have been done a lot better. He's not shown enough to where you can get a good sense of his character before the big end reveal. And Shuya seemed to be more of a prop in the movie than anything. The other major characters, such as Hiroki and Shinji, were dwindled down to mere plot devices. And I think with a lot of the stuff the writer of the film tried to put into the movie version might confuse some of the people who hadn't read the book version, because there were some things that were brought up or shown but never explained.
One last thing to bring up is the music (and the cinematography). I figured, from the book, the music would be some old school rock songs, but as that whole theme was removed from the film, they used a lot of classical music or orchestral music. And I have to say, for the most part, I really enjoyed that choice. Though some of the time it was too much and took me out of the scene, but overall, I really liked how the music was done for this film. That just really struck me as something to mention. And to touch on the cinematography briefly... nothing special, though the scene toward the end with the fire after the explosion was pretty cool looking.
Overall, without looking at the film as an adaptation, I might give it a star higher. But this review is written for those curious about how it adds up to the book. As an adaptation, I would have given it a 2. As a non-adaptation, maybe a 4. So I'm meeting in the middle.
DVD Review: Battle Royale
Summary: 5 Stars
Junior High School students brutally murdering each other for the sake of their own survival... What more can be said. Blood, gore, suspense, passion, fear. So many emotions that are so well portrayed. That's what made me enjoy this movie so much. The way it's done helps you to get inside the head of most of the students and actually start to think they way they do. It was really cool.
This version of the DVD was great. There were a ton of special features, and it wasn't most of the lame stuff you get with the average DVD. A lot of it was pretty interesting.
Description of Battle Royale: Director's Cut (Collector's Edition)
With the Japanese currently leading the way in thought-provoking cinematic violence, it's only fitting that Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale is being touted as a Clockwork Orange for the 21st century. Based on the novel by Koshun Takami, the film opens with a series of fleeting images of unruly Japanese schoolchildren, whose bad behavior provides a justification for the "punishments" that will ensue. Once the prequel has been dispensed with, the classmates are drugged and awaken on an island where they find they have been fitted with dog collars that monitor their every move. Instructed by their old teacher ("Beat" Takeshi) with the aid of an upbeat MTV-style video, they are told of their fate: after an impartial lottery they have been chosen to fight each other in a three-day, no-rules contest, the "Battle Royale." Their only chance of survival is through the death of all their classmates.Some pupils embrace their mission with zeal, while others simply give up or try to become peacemakers and revolutionaries. However, the ultimate drive for survival comes from the desire to protect the one you love. Battle Royale works on many different levels, highlighting the authorities' desperation to enforce law and order and the alienation caused by the generation gap. Whether you consider the film an important social commentary or simply watch it for the adrenaline-fueled violence, this is set to become cult viewing for the computer game generation and beyond. --Nikki Disney
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