Battle Royale (Batoru rowaiaru) — 6Very rarely do I actually let any other than my girlfriend pick what I watch, but this time I had no idea what I wanted to watch so I let a shout out on facebook and the first response i got was Battle Royale. I was a little hesitant about the whole thing, but I had heard a lot of good things about this movie, and well, there were some really cool parts, but for the most part I got bored after about halfway through.
Here’s the basic outline of the story, or at least as I understood it. A random class of the Japanese equivalent of High School students gets to be very, VERY unlucky. Basically they get kidnapped, sent to and island, where the only way out is to be the last one alive. No joke. There was actually some script in the beginning introducing you to the world, and telling you why it is, but honestly it didn’t even make sense. And there are rules, simple, but easy to understand. Basically kill everyone, stay out of the danger zones, and you only have 3 days. If there is more than one person alive at the end of 3 days, the collars(i’ll get into this in a bit) will all explode and then no one will survive.
Now heres the thing, they are given a pack. inside the pack is food and water, a map and compass and a weapon. Now the most fucked up thing in the packs is that not everyone gets an actually weapon. One person got a megaphone, another person got binoculars. While this was going on some other students where getting bow and arrows, grenades, machetes, and throughout the movie a ton of people get guns. Good luck to the fucker with binoculars.
Now as far as the collars go, they have GPS, microphones, a heart monitor, and of course, and exploding device on them. GPS so that the BR act(Battle Royale act) can see where everyone is. A heart monitor so that they can see who is still alive and who has died. Microphones so that they can hear what is going on and who is planning what. Now if one of them tries to plot against the BR act, the BR act can explode the collar, or is you try to swim off the island, or of course if time runs out.
Ok got all that? ok well once they are let loose the first few kills are epically amazing, and gruesome to boot, so its all friggin awesome! For about 20 minutes, then the story of each and every individual of the 40 kids into play, well 38 technically since 2 were killed before the game started. Once every character had to have a story I got bored. I can see that a few need a story, but every single once? No thank you. The other thing that got to me was that everyone did not want to kill their friends, but its life or death, if you don’t kill then by default you are already dead. I would be the bastard making a friend out of someone just to get close enough to kill them the move on.
Anywho remember how I mentioned Danger zones? ya well they are constantly listed off in the movie like something epic is supposed to happen in them, but you never see what happens in a danger zone. its just one of those things where if I saw what would happen just once, I would be ecstatic! but no, you never find out what happens, or what it means. So its just a waste of time on screen.
Now if you don’t know, this was a Japanese movie, in its original language with English subtitles. I have no problem with this. But from watching enough Anime as a kid I know when the translation is not right. This movie was chocked full of bad translation. Now I’m not so much of an expert that I can tell you what was supposed to be said, but i know it was wrong at certain points. The other thing that got to me was that whoever edited this movie needs to be shot, there was over 6 times where someone either spliced wrong, or it was just bad editing, because characters were jerky at points, and you could tell that they just edited and choose a different shot in the middle of another one.
All in all, the first half of the movie was glorious, whereas if there was no story and it just went into hardcore killing after then games got started I would have actually enjoyed it more. But it is an entertaining movie, I just had beef with certain things in it and I think that they could have done just a little bit better, and also that the movie could have used more time in the editing process.
base score = 7
+1 for awesome opening
+1 for a great idea
-1 for giving everyone a story
+1 for a great idea of random weapon or not packs
-1 for never using a danger zone
-1 for bad editing
-1 for bad translation.
=6/10
Last updated: 2010-01-12 01:42:02 by Tolll
