Battle Royale

 Battle Royale 

 

Battle royale is a Japanese made movie made In 2000 with a budget of $4.5 million, and made $30.6 million at the box office, the movie starts in a class room of 42 students, (survivors), who are presented with the rules and how the ‘game’ works, the dark theme of the film is kept the whole way through. Using Neale’s genre theory it’s clear it reinforces it as we get a unconventional style, leaning heavily eastern in terms of the what see on screen with the oriental style of the buildings in the mise en scene to tell us where we are, the narrative of the movie then sends our characters, the students to a deserted island, in which they are sent with weapons and food etc the narrative explores heavily on morality, and makes the viewer think what they would do in this situation, after it’s discovered that their neck collars detonate if they break the rules, the students then take it upon themselves to survive in the best way they think, which is where binary opposition is introduced where some of them choose to fight and try to win to be the last one alive, whereas others don’t want to hurt anyone and play more passively in order to succeed.

 

The main characters are Shuya Nanahara who is a male,  Noriko Nakagawa who is female,  Shogo Kawada who is male and doesn’t really want to hurt anyone but wants to win, Takeshi Kitano who is a male and is the main antagonist, the one who set everything up and Kazuo Kiriyama who is male, none of them want to die, they all want to survive, although they each survive depending on their moral outlook.

 

Using Neale’s genre theory the movie reinforces the idea that how the genre is kept, however small parts are changed to keep the viewer interested, this unconventional movie shows this by the theme shows us a very dark, action, romance that is brutal in the way the characters are made to be understood and related to, and then they get killed of unpredictably we also get the reoccurring theme of binary opposition, good and bad , clearly it’s a bad thing that the game exists, and we have our pro and antagonist, however the characters are not completely 2 dimensional the film makes an effort to sympasise with.

 

This movie differs in regard to where the film was made, and who it was made in japan, a socialist country that is completely unconventional compared to westernized movies. Which have a more capitalist right-wing mindset, the nonlinear layout also is very unconventional with the clips after explaining why instead of explaining before.