Battle Royale: The Complete Collection

By Less Lee Moore

For those (like me) who have not yet been seduced by the legendary Japanese film Battle Royale, this new Anchor Bay collection—featuring the theatrical cut, the 2001 special edition, Battle Royale: Requiem, plus a disc of featurettes and extras—is nothing short of jaw-dropping. The four-disc set comes in a beautifully packaged booklet and is available in both DVD and Blu-Ray formats.

Battle Royale was originally released in 2000, and was adapted from Koushun Takami’s controversial 1999 novel of the same name. The film exploded into the new millennium, riveting audiences, breaking box office records, outraging censors, and transfixing a generation of film nerds like Quentin Tarantino. Its synopsis is straightforward:

In the near future, the economy has collapsed, unemployment has soared, and juvenile crime has exploded. Fearful of their nation’s youth, the Japanese government passes The BR Law: Each year, a 9th grade class is sent to a remote island where they will be locked into exploding neck collars, given a random weapon, and forced to hunt and kill each other until there is only one survivor left.

It seems unbelievable that over a decade has passed since the original film’s release and somehow I had never seen it. (As it turns out, it was not available in North America—apart from bootleg copies—until 2010.) So I was quite excited about reviewing this new reissue.

Although I’m no tech nerd, the Blu-Ray transfer is gorgeous: the visuals are crisp, the colors are stunning, and the sound (Dolby TrueHD 7.1 in Japanese and 5.1 in English) exquisite, particularly when the rousing strains of Verdi’s Requiem come blasting through the speakers. But what about the movie?

The violence is definitely over-the-top, especially considering the time period in it was made, and also because the main characters (with a handful of exceptions) are all played by actual teenagers. Their youth works in their favor. They look exactly like teenagers are supposed to look and act exactly like teenagers would act upon being thrust into such a untenable situation. Plot wise, too, the movie is believable, yet shocking.

There is not much of a difference in run time between the theatrical cut and the Special Edition, which was released in theaters in 2001 with about ten minutes of additional footage, all of which was shot about six months after the film’s initial release on December 16, 2000. But there is a bit of a difference in tone. Most of the extra footage consists of flashback sequences that are intended to give more depth to the characters. With the exception of Mitsuki’s flashback, I felt that these were distracting and seemed out of place. Intriguingly, although there is behind-the-scenes footage of these scenes being shot on the Special Features disc, there is no explanation as to why director Kinji Fukasaku decided to film them in the first place.

Unfortunately, Battle Royale: Requiem is but a pale shadow of the groundbreaking grandeur of the original film. This is most likely due to the fact that Fukasaku died from prostate cancer a few months into shooting and the project was taken over by his son (and screenwriter of the original film) Kenta Fukasaku.

Although it begins with much promise by upping the stakes considerably, the characters do more mugging than acting, particularly Riki Takeuchi, who chews the scenery about as frequently as he chews packets of what appear to be birth control pills (this is never explained). There is an extremely intriguing plo tline in Requiem about American foreign policy, terrorism, and the Middle East, but it is never fully explored.

The fourth disc is wonderful and well worth watching, however. It contains a “Making Of” documentary, a press conference from 2000 (where the cast appears in character), audition and rehearsal footage, a special effects comparison featurette, and much more. The overall takeaway of these features is that Kinji Fukasaku was one tough dude and cinema lost a true auteur when he passed away in 2003.

He filmed Battle Royale—his 60th film—at age 70, but you would never know it from the way he looked or his attitude. From all accounts he put these actors (and the crew) through hell, but they cannot speak more highly of his tenacity and most of all, what an inspiration he is to them. On set, he is a ball-breaker, but in his more candid interviews, he comes across as soft-spoken yet passionate. “I identified with it personally,” he says of Takami’s book, explaining his need to put it on film. Battle Royale seems to be a fitting end to his lengthy and esteemed career.

Battle Royale: The Complete Collection was released by Anchor Bay on March 20. It is available on DVD, Blu-Ray, and digital download.