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Battle Royale
"You've been drugged while travelling to your graduation ceremony, along with all your 9th grader friends. You'll wake up in an island in the middle of nowhere, with a strange necklace around your neck and the feeling of dread climbing up your spine. A teacher your had in 7th grade appears and explains that you and your class have been chosen (and should be honored) for Battle Royale. What is a Battle Royale?
"You see, that necklace around your neck. It's lethal. Try to take it off, and it'll explode and automatically slit your throat. Boom, you're dead. You also can't be in the wrong place in the Island Map (aka Danger Zones) at the wrong time (every two hours), because the collar'll explode. We'll be adding danger zones to the already existing ones, so be sure to mark them in your map!
"So what's next? You'll be given a backpack with food and water supplies, and a weapon. But you could get anything as a weapon. Anything ranging from an AK-47, to a GPS device, to a baseball bat, to a paper fan, to a cooking pot lid. Won't it be fun? It'll automatically eliminate natural advantages. The class geek could get a shotgun, while the most violent jock could get a paper fan.
"You have 72 hours to kill as many of your classmates as you can. If by the 72th hour we don't have only one person left, only one winner, the remaining necklaces will explode and the game will be forfeit."
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This is an introduction (of sorts) to Battle Royale; I wrote it after the third time I saw it. It's a Japanese movie which was released in 2000, with a sequel in 2003. It's, to say the least, a very shocking and gory movie, but differently from most gory movies, it poses a moral question which has been poking at the back of my head fro the past 6 years.
I'm curious. It's an underground movie, which wasn't released in the States (not banned... merely not released). From what I hear, Europe is closer to Japan media-wise, since a lot of the material I get that is not released in USA comes from Europe, which makes me wonder if anybody else has seen it and what they think about it, mainly because we have a hell of a lot of European members. I myself would recommend to anybody.
If you haven't, the moral questioning is still valid. Please share your opinions.
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