Battle Royale with Cheese

We're quite relieved that dear Alisdair does not constantly require us to buy him the 'New Hot Phone'. Every so often, however, he does demand that we sit with him to watch the 'New Hot Film' – albeit perhaps some months after its ‘hotness’ has cooled everywhere else.  He may be the coming generation, but when all is said and done, this is Airnefitchie, after all.

Last night, we watched a double-bill of Battle Royale and The Hunger Games.

Alaster had given us some warning of what we would be watching, and so I did a brief bit of research.  I found the book The Hunger Games in The Other One's laundry basket, so I gave it a quick read.  It's always nice to hear the exploits of a heroine who’s deadly with a bow and arrow; a girl after my own heart really.

What do you fancy for tea tonight?  Deer?  Rabbit?  Trespasser?

But having not heard about Battle Royale, I gave it a quick internet search.  Some of the reviews I read left me fairly panting with antici...

...pation..

Robert Koehler compares it to 'the outrage over youth violence' that Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange generated in early-'70s Britain.  Quentin Tarantino praised Battle Royale as the best film he had seen in the past two decades: 'If there's any movie that's been made since I've been making movies that I wish I had made, it's that one'.  Michael Mirasol praised Battle Royale for its 'thoughtful characterisation' that is 'lavished upon all the students' and concluded that it is an 'intensely violent fable aimed at a young audience, but with true feeling, intelligence, and respect'.  R.L. Shaffer of IGN gave the film a score of 8 out of 10, taking 'a moment to thank The Hunger Games for reminding us how awesome Battle Royale really is'.  And Maggie Lee of Reuters describes Battle Royale as the 'film that pioneered the concept of the teen death game'.

It must be quite a move, indeed!  It was shaping up to be the Japanese version of A Clockwork Orange meets Lord of the Flies and not to be missed (although if it had been made by Mr Tarantino, all bets would have been off).

The Guardian said it, so it must be true!

The Hunger Games, on the other hand, was mostly reviewed as being a rip-off of Battle Royale – despite Suzanne Collins, the HG author, citing inspiration from the juxtaposition of the Iraq War and reality television (I believe her) and maintaining that she 'had never heard of that book [Battle Royale] until her book was turned in'.

In any case, Henry popped some kernels, I made some hot toddies, and we all settled down with an Irish wolfhound each on our feet.  Alistair sat in a sleeping bag on the floor munching on venison jerky.

After five hours (we had to have an extensive loo break, and hunt for the missing popcorn down the back of the settee) I wasn't quite sure what had just happened.

For one thing, how is The Hunger Games a worse rip-off of Battle Royale, than Battle Royale was a bad rip-off of Lord of the Flies?  Eh?

Watching these sorts of movies always makes one wonder how one would personally react and murder the others; and in Battle Royale it would be far too easy, especially if you were one of the first pupils out of the room.  Finding a hidden spot and taking them out one-by-one as they left the building would have been a work of a moment, and with any luck at all you could have purloined all their weapons to boot.  You probably wouldn’t have enough ammo to deal with all 42 opponents, but at least you would have definitely taken out a fair bit of the competition before having to retreat and re-work your strategy.  That the adults would send everyone out sequentially through the same door seems virtually to invite this.

The Hunger Games solved this with the idea of their Horn of Plenty and setting all the 'contestants' off at once in a circular pattern.  If anything, rather than making threats against Collins, Battle Royale fans should be thanking her for devising a game that might actually be interesting to play or watch.

Also, I felt there were too many characters in Battle Royale.  There was some hasty character development, but it mainly felt like a bunch of screaming schoolchildren, and who wouldn’t want to cut them in in the middle of nowhere on a deserted island?

Again, The Hunger Games seemed to solve this – though I wonder how much someone might have understood this without reading the book.  The Hunger Games film seemed a bit rushed to get everything in at once, but at least included a nice amount of backstory for the main character.  Battle Royale seemed a bit muddled in comparison.  Maybe I dropped a bit of popcorn down my gilet at a crucial moment and didn't see something that would have explained everything for every person.  But when all was said and done, I didn't care who lived and who died; only that they were doing it all wrong and needlessly wasting ammunition.

Tragically, I now feel I need to read the book Battle Royale.  The movie hasn't exactly left me wanting more, and there is even a sequel out there somewhere, but it has left me wanting to understand just what the Dickens was going on.  What made the schoolchildren become such a danger to society?  What made society collapse in the first place?  It could have been covered by the titles at the beginning very easily, like in The Hunger Games.

I'm normally more critical of films based on books, especially if I've actually read the book, whether before or after the occasion of viewing the film.  The Hunger Games seemed a bit more successful in its adaptation.  Of course, not having read Battle Royale, my opinion of the film might change once I have, but as it stands it is very silly.

The Hunger Games just seems more plausible.

I do so enjoy our movie nights, but hope that next time Alistair will allow us to watch something starring George Sanders.

Ah, be still my beating heart…