Story:
Tokyo, a dirty orange-red late afternoon. Suddenly
Shinjuku's skyscrapers all tremble and collapser.
Japan has fallen victim to terrorism, and the perpetrators
are WIld 7, a Japanese group lead by Shuya Nanahara,
survivor of the Battle Royale program from the first
movie.
When
Wild 7 subsequently claims credit for the bombing
and declares a war against the government of Japan,
the government responds the way it knows best: it
launches a new Battle Royale program whereby a lucky
class of junior high school graduates are sent on
a do-or-die mission to kill Shuya Nanahara and Wild
7.
The
moment the junior high school students are herded
into a giant cage and their teacher Riki Takeuchi
strolls to the front of the room, it is clear that
BR2 is going to be different from Battle Royale. Addressing
his hysterical students, Takeuchi explains that the
white line bisecting the room divides those on the
'winning team' from those on the 'losing team'; those
on one side will fight for the government to exterminate
the terrorists, and those on the other side will be
killed. One by one, as Takeuchi does a roll call,
the students all cross over to the 'winning' side,
picking up their kit in agreement to the terms of
the game. All students except one, that is -- a single
boy, Shintaro Makimura, refuses to recognize the authority
of the game. Shot in the leg, Takeuchi asks him to
reconsider, but he is obstinate and is executed in
front of the other students, still clutching the rugby
ball from the class's last game, signed wth friendship
messages from all members of the class.
Another
difference with BR2 is that a buddy system is in place
whereby if one contestant dies, the collar of the
other contestant of the same number will detonate.
Thus, the death of the Shintaro brings with it the
death of a female student who cries out for her mother
before having her neck blown open.
With
all the students agreeing to side with the 'winning
team', the operation to eliminate Wild 7 commences
with an early morning landing on its island stronghold.
Review: Battle Royale II is not a thematic
rehash of the first movie, and it is not as simple,
but it is not actually all that dissimilar, either.
Whereas the first Battle Royale focussed on the inheritance
of violence and the paranoia and mistrust between
junior high school students when placed in a brutal
state-sponsored death game -- a game in which they
had to decide whether they could kill their friends
in order to survive -- the students of the second
Battle Royale are essentially conscripts in a war
against terrorism. The movie therefore exams their
individual moral duty to decide what is just, a right
which initially appears to have been denied them when
they 'chose' to be on the 'winning team'.
Despite (or because) of this ambiguous message of
individual responsibility, It is likely that BR2 will
not be welcomed in the United States. It isn't going
to help, of course, that the film is sympathetic to
terrorism, strongly implies that the country responsible
for the fascist state of affairs in the BR world is
the US and -- as if that wasn't bad enough -- that
the true meaning of friendship and freedom can only
be found in countries freed from that influence, such
as Afghanistan. Of course the Afghanistan in the BR
world is not necessarily the same as the Afghanistan
in our world, but it cannot have been chosen by chance
by writer Kenta Fukusaku, either.
Getting back to the nuts and bolts of the movie,
the first time I saw the movie I was horrified by
Riki Takeuchi's over-the-top performance as the pill-chewing
absolutely insane teacher out for revenge. I wouldn't
blame Takeuchi for the over-the-top protrayal, however,
because as far as I can tell, that over-the-top acting
style is his bread and butter. His casting must therefore
have either been a deliberate artistic choice or an
unfortunate artistic error. In any case, he robs most
of his scenes of any visceral believability. A second
viewing of the movie redeemed him somewhat, though;
his final rugby scene in the movie was significant
as it showed him reclaiming his right to individual
choice by symbolically crossing back over the white
line, and if his character had not been so over the
top throughout, this metaphor would have been obscured
by the sheer ridiculousness of the scene. As it stands,
I thought it was a satisfying character trajectory.
The other actors of the movie are all adequate in
their roles, though over-acting is the order of the
day and I've never been a fan of Tatsuya Fujiwara
(Shuya Nanahana). His own brand of melodrama, further
exaggerated by the romantically gothic sets in the
Wild 7 hideout, where he sits brooding in a blanket
surrounded by what must be something like a hundred
candles, gave the movie a self-conscious sort of teen
angst that detracted from the depth of the movie.
Oh, and what's with his mascara? I started to wonder
part way through if Kenta Fukusaku had actually designed
the movie to be a metaphor for harmless teenage rebellion
by making Wild 7 look like a rock group on purpose...
but even in a stylized movie like BR2, I found the
makeup and perfect hair of Nanahana to be too jarring
-- or maybe that's what he learned in Afghanistan?
Maybe that's the secret of the happy and free Afghan
smiles? (Of course, I should probably be jarred by
the women all having perfect hair and makeup, too,
except that just about every movie is guilty of that.)
Ai Maeda is somewhat remarkable in her role as the
confused and angry daughter of the first movie's Kitano,
on her own quest to find out what the deal was with
her father and the girl in the centre of Kitano's
painting from the first. While her character's development
tugs for tears in parts, it's her ice-cold killer
portrayal that sticks in the mind.
The cinematography wasn't remarkable, but the jerky
Saving Private Ryan-like camera work was effective
at making all the battle scenes hellish, and blood
was liberally applied throughout. Speaking of blood
and explosions and all those things that the teenage
punks were probably in my theatre to see, some of
the blood splatters and explosions looked like they
relied heavily CGI/CSO, but if you don't go in to
the movie expecting to see a movie made on a $80+
million dollar budget, you probably won't be disappointed
or distracted by the quality of the action sequences.
Musically, I thought that the first 15 minutes of
the movie were the strongest. The title sequence was
very powerful, and up until the end of the Wild 7
manifesto, the music played a central and effective
roll. As the movie progressed, though, the perpetual
music got tiring and the cues were just as manipulative
as any Hollywood score during the key emotional moments.
Overall, the first time I saw BR2 I was very disappointed.
Here, I thought, was a movie that lacked all the thematic
and emotional depth of the first outing and substituted
instead a lot of tiresome gunfights and some really
questionable (and naive) political forays with the
inclusion of an American superstate and a free Afghanistan.
I still feel that the gunfights were boring after
the second viewing and I'm not sure about the choice
with Afghanistan, but I had to revise my opinion about
the depth of the movie.
The metaphors in the second movie are not as sublime
or as useful as the single metaphor from first BR.
The first BR was a sort of catch-all for describing
just about everything in society -- much like The
Matrix -- but Requiem is instead quite similar to
The Matrix: Reloaded. Beyond the politics of BR2,
the central question is about individual choice, and
every character in the film gives Kenta Fukusaku a
lens to explore the means by which we make choices
and the barriers that society places in our way to
prevent us from making our choices freely. Some of
the studies in the film seem trite and I feel that
perhaps not enough thought was given to making the
plot as coherent as it should have been -- the inclusion
of the buddy system, for example, seemed completely
capricious and nonsensical (probably just an avenue
by which more blood could be displayed) -- but at
least Fukusaku explored something new with Requiem,
and did so unflinchingly.
