The Kids Get Schooled Again

Battle Royale is an odd film, but one with a singular vision. A film about high school students being forced to fight each other to the death to please and placate the aging, adult population of Japan certainly feels dark and dystopian. But it also commented on a number of trends that were plaguing Japanese society at the time. The rise of schoolyard gangs and the fear those gangs caused to the older populace. The aging Japanese populace producing less kids, sending the population closer and closer into obsolescence. It felt like the kids weren’t respecting their elders and the adults didn’t want to continue the trend if that was going to be the case.

A movie tapping into those kids of fears feels prescient and real. But then to do it with such an over-the-top storyline filled with gore and violence certainly took it just beyond the realm of commentary. It was both an action film about societal issues and a parody of itself going five steps beyond the expected, ratcheting everything up further and further until it finds this weird kind of nirvana. The film works because it’s both too serious and not taking itself seriously enough. The tone is weird, but the film is fun.

Unfortunately for the sequel, Battle Royale II - Requiem, the same cannot be said. While certain the film still provides the same levels of gore and violence, it does so with a self-serious storyline that has to hit its notes again and again, losing track of its momentum in the process. Getting through this sequel felt like a slog and the movie can’t help but stop its own action regularly to explain itself, to go over its story again and again, wasting time on needless introspection among a bunch of characters we barely care about at all.

And I get it, in a way. You want the audience to care about what’s going on. The film is packed full of characters that are all going to die, and if it can make you care about them then the horrors of this war will feel more real and tangible. But the film never finds a way to get us to care about the characters, new or returning, so it feels so dreadful to have to pause and listen to them go on about the horrors of the conflict or the dangers of being an adult when we don’t know anything about any of them and don’t want to learn. This is a film that thinks it has something profound to say, but it spends so long belaboring the point in the middle of a goofy action film that we end up zoning out and ignoring everything in the process. It just doesn’t work.

Set three years after the events of the first movie, Battle Royale II - Requiem focuses on a new class of high schoolers who were sent on a field trip for the Christmas holiday but, in reality, have been conscripted into the Battle Royale program. This class has been sent to hunt down Wild Seven, a terrorist group (who launched a particularly daring attack on Japanese soil, blowing up multiple skyscrapers the previous Christmas), and they have 72 hour to take out the terrorists and their leader, Shuya Nanahara (Tatsuya Fujiwara), or they’ll all end up dead.

The game works differently than before. Instead of having to kill each other, they’re all trying to stay alive, with the kids paired up boy-girl. If one dies they both die, the bombs on their necks going off. If they try to escape, they die. If they fail to complete objectives, they die. If they get too far apart, they die. The government wants them to fight, but they also don’t want them to get too sure of themselves. Maybe they succeed, or maybe they cause enough carnage that Wild Seven folds. All that is sure is that the adults in charge are happy to watch the kids kill each other in this new war.

The original Battle Royale had a simple enough premise: adults don’t trust kids, so they make the kids fight each other to the death as a sort of “message” to all the other kids out there. Here, though, the whole message of the film is muddied and strange. Because it’s a Battle Royale film, the sequel has to stick to some basic ideas: kids fighting a war they can’t win, with bombs strapped to their necks, out in the middle of nowhere on an island. But once those elements are in play, everything else about the story feels strained trying to fit within the framework.

For starters, if the kids are sent off to fight in this war, why is their whole mission still treated like a Battle Royale game? Why are the bombs strapped to their necks linked to other students? That just makes their deaths feel outside their own control. And why the specific 72 hour window before they all lose? Wouldn’t it be better to give them time to train and plan and get in? The mission had to have been planned for months, so that the government knew where to send their new child soldiers and how to control them, but then the students are dumped into the war without any training just to fight against previous students who have spent three years training to be soldiers. From a military standpoint it doesn’t make much sense.

On top of this is the message about terrorists and war. The film has a strong anti-America Intervention streak, with characters railing about how America has gone in and bombed a bunch of nations, Japan included, and… well, I’m not actually certain what the and is. Yes, American acting as the policeman of the world could be viewed as wrong to one of the countries that the country has attacked. But how does that relate to a terrorist group attacking their own country to overthrow a government that is willingly sacrificing its own children for sport? Both sides of the conflict make the same argument, too, so who is right or wrong?

It’s especially muddied when you factor in that the heroic terrorists, Wild Seven, dress like Middle East terrorists. Clearly this would play on fears held by Americans (who were still reeling from the 9/11 attacks two years prior) but they aren’t attacking Americans, they’re attacking the Japanese. So what is the message? How does any of this relate together, and what does any of it have to do with Japanese adults hating their own children to the point they want to see them all die? It’s so confusing and it drags the movie down.

Not that the film really has a ton going for it otherwise. Despite a larger body count and more gore, the action in the film is pretty awful. It’s poorly filmed and cut to pieces in editing, making it hard to watch. But the action is also poorly performed, with characters firing guns that clearly are props, barely aiming and feeling no recoil. Characters can miraculously dodge hundreds of bullets in one scene, and then die to perfectly aimed shots in the next. There’s no rhyme or reason except the story saying it’s time to kill someone just because. None of it has weight and it all lands very poorly.

Finally, the acting is just terrible. The new characters don’t really have emotions. They just scream things at the top of their lungs, especially when some other character is dying. You’re going to hear the names of the characters a lot, cried out at top volume when they die, and it gets tiresome. But this is basically all the direction the kids were given for their performances. Yell, run around, but not actually act. No one in this film can act, and it’s so hard to watch. I hated everyone in this film and I really wished they all could have just died in the first act of the film. But they don’t, not fast enough for my tastes.

I’m not saying the first Battle Royale was high cinema but it did have standards. A tight story, decent characters, good action. Battle Royale II - Requiem squanders all of that on a boring, poorly acted, hard to watch film that makes no sense. This is the kind of sequel that makes you wonder why they even bothered trying to make a second film at all. It ruins everything that was good about the first film without having enough new ideas to carry a sequel. It’s just plain bad.