#41: "Could you kill your best friend?"

I watched Battle Royale yesterday.

It's a Japanese movie, released in 2000, and has been in the news lately because of the recent release of the Hunger Games movie. A lot of people claim that BR is where Suzanne Collins got inspiration from for THG, but who knows. The concept's been seen way before in Lord of the Flies (which I haven't read yet. But I will! Someday.)
And it is a highly controversial movie, met with many bans since it was released.
Fact: I'm attracted to controversial media as shrimp to, say, the angler fish's bio-luminescence.

A summary of the the plot would be something like this:

At the dawn of the new millennium, Japan is in a a state of near-collapse. Unemployment is at an all-time high, and violence among the nation's youth is spiraling out of control. With schoolchildren boycotting their classes and physically abusing their teachers, a beleaguered and near-defeated government decides to introduce a radical new measure: the Battle Royale Act Overseen by their former teacher Kitano and requiring that a randomly chosen school class is taken to a deserted island and forced to fight each other to the death, the Act dictates that only one pupil is allowed to survive the punishment. He or she will return, not as the victor, but as the ultimate proof of the lengths to which the government is prepared to go to curb the tide of juvenile disobedience.

A class is picked at random, kidnapped on their school trip and brought to a deserted island to participate in a battle to the death with each other. Last person alive leaves, or everyone dies. And that gets to them real good. Everybody gets so fucked up in the mind that they're ready to slaughter their classmates in order to leave the island. There's this one scene where two best friends are shown having a teary, senti farewell, and later in the movie they're shown dead, having killed each other. O_O
The movie has a certain je ne sais quoi about it. It sets you thinking: "What would you do in a situation like this?", "Would you even last a couple of hours?", "Can you really trust anyone?", and "Could you kill your own best friend?"

Have I been losing much sleep because of the movie?
Oh yeah.


It's sick?
Yes.

Twisted?
Correct.

Extremely violent?
Of course.

Would you watch it again?
...
Yeah. But a long time from now. The movie is fantastic. But I've had enough depressing, subversive media for now.


BR's been adapted from a novel of the same name. And there's a manga version of it too.
The novel I might read someday, but the manga? NOPE NOPE NOPE OH FUCK NO NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS THAT MANGA IS FUCKED UP BEYOND BELIEF I AM NOT GOING ANYWHERE NEAR IT ASDFGHJKLLKJHJ

I really need to watch a couple of happy movies right now. .-.

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Edit 1: Not long after I wrote this, I read somewhere that there's a BR reference in Shaun of the Dead in the form of a poster. I checked, and HOLY SHIT IT'S THERE.
How every movie I seem to watch nowadays is in some way connected to Simon Pegg, I'll never know. But this is getting freaky.

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Edit 2: Found a copy of Lord of the Flies at local bookstore. And I said I'd had enough of subversive literature. Hahaha.