Sunday, March 01, 2026

Battle Royale: Movie Review






Links to stuff mentioned:

Related Playlists:





at

2 comments:

  1. Futami-chanMarch 1, 2026 at 11:22 PM

    No wonder why people in the West or U.S used the word "classes". Whenever I used the word myself I just meant to say "period" instead.

    Maybe some more time to bond, although just like anybody in the world, the students will have to study in different schools eventually. Point still holds. But still, if I may have a guess then maybe it's more taboo because in the culture, schools are considered sacred or places you're supposed to take serious. I can't really make good guesses judging from my own culture given that there would be even more reasons to make such a movie taboo here.
    Actually it makes sense, if even the Chinese or Koreans made a movie about students killing anybody at all, that would still be likely considered unacceptable. I just don't know how to rationalize this.

    BR is a very typical Japanese movie. Even more so can be said about the sequel (which I liked but doubt most people share my preferences). It's hard to know if the movie has seeped into Japanese culture a lot or it's just being typical Japanese, but stuff similar to BR is just everywhere. The genre of "survival game in which only one person would be able to stay alive" must be a prevalent preference, a lot of Japanese entertainment works are about it.
    This reminds me of how people on English internet always ask about "Why Japanese always make anime or stuff about school life" and then they proceed to conjure armchair sociological explanations. Well, perhaps those people have never managed to see many other grotesque yakuza manga the Japanese publishers have managed to churn out? There are way too obvious answers that make sense for the question, but the people always decide to ignore and choose to think it's because Japanese seem to consider school life the best time of their life and they're protected then blah blah.

    Why did I forget to mention this? Talking about how prevalent the motif or elements of the movie is also to say... it's no longer horrifying as it should have been. Speaking for myself by the time I managed to watch it I have consumed way too much Japanese media to find anything thrilling but how exaggerated Japanese actings are. But maybe people these days may also find the movie to be plastic in terms of the props (the nastiest thing in the movie I can only say is the chopped head). It's a decent movie still.

    Japanese being competitive is something I don't remember to have seen in this movie. The only genre of entertainment when they do that that I managed to see are anime or manga about sports. Other than that it's backstories about academic records at best.
    There's a whole another topic to be said about competitiveness, but the term is just like Ayn Rand's notion of selfishness that no longer means anything. Given that a Soviet student just has to haul their arse prepping for maximum exam scores, just like anybody anywhere at all. Chopsticks lands just have the peculiarity of being more punishing of minor offenses.

    I miss being told by my sister incessantly as to how Hunger Games adaptation lacked the abc xyz of the novel while watching. Had to watch while she wasn't around IIRC. Can only remember well the ending.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Futami-chanMarch 1, 2026 at 11:39 PM

    And why do I always forget the existence of the manga. Even though I first read some chapters of it when I first heard about BR on the internet, before I finally watched the movie. I was still a scaredy cat then thinking the movie could be too scary for me (and other internet limitations). My memory only suggests the manga is gory or violence to a degree. Don't know if it's interesting. It's amazing I managed to forget its existence up until this very moment because typically I should always grasp every single adaptation of the Japanese stuff I'm interested in.

    ReplyDelete