Battle Royale

Battle Royale (2000) puts a school class on an island and forces them to kill each other, and the director drew the idea from his own adolescence. Japan, in the near future. Arguing that the young are out of control, a law is passed: each year a class is selected, taken to an island, given random weapons, and expected to produce a single survivor in three days. They wear explosive collars. The film does not only show the children turning on each other; it builds who does what out of who they are. Some kill immediately, some never touch anyone, some kill themselves, and some form a group and try to hold together, and that attempt collapses too. Kinji Fukasaku wrote it out of what happened to him. At fifteen his entire class was put to work in a munitions factory. In July 1945 it was bombed; to survive they sheltered underneath each other. Some of his classmates died, and afterwards the surviving children were made to dig through the rubble and bury the dead. Fukasaku said that was the day he understood the state cared nothing for the young, and that a deep hatred of all adults took root in him. The film reached the Japanese parliament. Some members used it as the emblem of a push to restrict violent productions and called it rubbish outright. That same year the age of criminal responsibility was lowered from sixteen to fourteen. It was Fukasaku's last film; he died during production of the sequel. It runs 114 minutes. Good for: Japanese cinema, dystopia, and hard satire. Less good for: the violence is very graphic and you are never allowed to forget the victims are children.