The sheer volume of movies available through theaters, home entertainment and services like Netflix can make it difficult to discern the good from the bad and the ugly in the world of cinema. Alternative Reel takes a major studio release and picks out an alternative film of a similar genre, theme or style for you to check out as a comparative primer.
When it comes to movies about teenagers murdering each other for sport, few franchises quench the public’s thirst for adolescent violence quite like The Hunger Games.
Adapted from a trilogy of young adult novels by Suzanne Collins, these films have cultivated a massive audience and even more impressive box office receipts. Slated with a Nov. 22 holiday release, Catching Fire, the second installment in the series, is being billed as one the biggest blockbusters of 2013.
The success of the franchise – and its appeal to young teenagers in particular – is interesting given its bleak premise.
In a post–apocalyptic future, the United States has been divided into a dozen impoverished districts that are governed by the Capitol, a utopia run by preening one-percenters who have designed a cruel plan to keep the lower classes in check.
Every year, two tributes aged 12-18 are selected from each sector to compete in the titular Hunger Games, a gladiatorial gauntlet where only the most skillful competitor survives. For the Capitol city dandies, it’s all invigorating reality entertainment. For the district members, it’s a death sentence.
This is, in many ways, a set-up reminiscent of Battle Royale (2000), Kinji Fukasaku’s cult classic adaptation of Koushun Takami’s novel of the same name.
In the alt-history timeline of Battle Royale, and a fearsome law called the BR Act serves a terrible purpose in turn-of-the-century Japan. Under BR guidelines, potentially rebellious high school kids are abducted to a remote island where they are forced to hunt and kill each other, each of them fitted with a high-tech collar that will explode if they do not comply.
The reward for the last student standing? A government-funded pension.
As with The Hunger Games, the student tributes enlisted under the BR Act in Battle Royale are dished out spare survival supplies and weapons of varying lethalness to carry out their misdeeds. In both films, any attempt at escape, or somehow skirting the rules, seems futile.
Battle Royale and The Hunger Games smartly take advantage their characters' youth to subvert genre tropes typically associated with high school dramas. The strong–jawed jocks are stupid, but ruthless as killers; the bitchy queen bees are opportunistic and paranoid about plotting behind each others’ backs; the love triangle, a seemingly obligatory narrative device for this type of fare, is present in both films (though it’s a little limp in Royale’s case).
Given the parallels of their narratives, Battle Royale and its Americanized companion only drastically diverge in one category: tone.
Where the first Hunger Games film is gray and humorless, shooting for gritty realism with a hand-held, shaky-cam aesthetic that confuses the action rather than heightening it, Battle Royale revels in colorful schlock and high-pitched melodrama.
It's plain to see why filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, a modern master of the exploitation genre, has cited Fukasaku’s film as one of his all time favorites. (Royale actress Chiaki Kuriyama appears in Tarantino’s pop epic Kill Bill as the manic, flail-toting schoolgirl Gogo Yubari.)
Like many of Tarantino’s films, Battle Royale takes an absolutely bananas plot – clean-cut, khaki-clad children being forced to hunt each other for a government pension – and cranks the style to 11. This gonzo mindset helps temper some of the queasiness of the subject material.
Taken on its narrative conceit alone, it does seem easy to dismiss Royale as a tasteless exercise in provocation, pitching underage violence as entertainment. I’d still argue Fukasaku’s film is better than the first Hunger Games – it's certainly more honest in its refusal to dull its tremendous violence . (The Hunger Games films have pretty tame PG-13 ratings despite the emphasis on children massacring each other.)
In fact, Battle Royale actually manages to avoid being totally bleak through time-tested and surprisingly wholesome messages. The film is almost goofily earnest: The power of teamwork in overcoming adversity, the importance of honesty between friends and the strength of young love are all themes championed without snark or irony.
This fine balance between bloodshed and a heart-on-the-sleeve mentality is kept in check thanks to the unfussy, handsome direction of Fukasaku. His staging of fight sequences is as swift and clean as a katana strike, and the pitched emotions, ranging from the high school soap operatics of the students to the stern terror embodied by the villainous BR trip leader, give a talented team of actors plenty to work with.
In terms of visual majesty, it helps that a tropical island locale, dotted with derelict, rust-eaten structures, serves as Battle Royale's gorgeous backdrop. Fukasaku manages to make his setting a distinct character all its own, as opposed to the derivative, largely anonymous dystopia of The Hunger Games movie.
More than a decade after its initial release, and now in the formidable shadow of TheHunger Games films, Battle Royale remains unforgettable in its striking contrast between the beautiful and the brutal. It’s cartoonish and loud, yet multi-faceted, no one character embodying pure good or evil in the primal struggle to survive. (Okay, maybe that one guy is kind of an asshole.)
Here's to hoping that Catching Fire can do a better job at matching Fukasaku's edge than its predecessor did. In the meantime, if you're in need of a movie that seamlessly blends wild genre thrills with high-stakes high school melodrama, look no further than Battle Royale.