Battle Royale

[PhoenixFlame]

Beat Takashi turns in a great performance here, but that may be because I'm familiar with other work of his.

The movie in general made a name for itself a few years ago in part because of the sensationalism and its tendency to become suddenly violent. For example, dumping Nanahara's best friend and roommate in the first few minutes of the movie was a nice little twist to help things along. The general "Lord of the Flies" idea of having these kids respond to a life or death situation in different ways was appealing to me, moreso than the ridiculous amount of gore.

Dystopian is the name of the game here, and I love dystopian works. It could have been better (the novel is by and large far superior to the movie, but that is no surprise) but for what it is, it's decent.

It's too bad the second movie in this series got too political and cheapened the individual nature of the character development by narrowing the cast down to 6 or 7 "important" characters.

 

[Amnestic]

Depends on how you define those three words really I guess.
Cool=Good for me generally, so yeah, I thought Battle Royale was pretty cool.
Stylish...well it has a style, and...it follows it. So it's stylish in it's own style...I guess?
Exciting- Well, it is. It was an exciting, moving and thought provoking film. I really should pick up the book one of these days...

When they're not balanced by "dystopian" and "horrifying", those words are completely out of place. To see it as a "light-hearted action flick" is to ignore the implications about the state of the world. You may as well giggle through Saw.

Oh no, I completely agree. The way you put it at first made me think that their opinions weren't restricted to cool, stylish and exciting. My bad, see where you're coming from now and I couldn't agree more.

 

[neems]

As Gloating Swine says, the translation for the book is appalling. I gave up in the end, it just made my head hurt - it did seem to be getting better as I went on, but I just couldn't be bothered.

Good movie though.