When I saw Battle Royale some ten years ago, I remember thinking it was a bit brainless and unoriginal, but still compelling. Perhaps a part of it was seeing The Running Man when I was still small enough to have a babysitter – I remember that because he was the one who brought the tape, with Fatal Attraction right after it, and for whatever reason the cartoony ultraviolence of The Running Man was deemed appropriate to show six-year-old me, while bunnies getting boiled was not. And then The Hunger Games came out, and one of the most common comments soon became that it was a rip-off of one or the other of these properties. A popular image going around the net right now is a riff on a line from Pulp Fiction: ‘What do they call The Hunger Games in
And the premise is the same: a bunch of kids are against their will sent to a wilderness, given weapons and told they must all kill one another until only one person remains. The backstory is different: in The Hunger Games it’s post-apocalyptic sci-fi, in which an oppressive state demands the fighting happens so that smaller societies who once rose in rebellion remember their place, while Battle Royale has a more satirical note, being based on the question of how to discipline children who are losing their respect for authority. This is the slight difference in the dynamic – the kids of The Hunger Games are blameless and innocent, but perhaps less identifiable as they’re from an imagined society. Those of Battle Royale are supposed to be responsible for their own fates because of delinquent behaviour – although of course innocents are involved there as well, so much of the same impact through indignation can be found.
That the story has been told before is not a big issue for me, though. I don’t mind seeing the same story in a different way. A lot of the media I consume is very derivative, and that’s fine – more important are characters, settings, relationships and the philosophical questions raised. And the fact is that the reason I disliked The Hunger Games boiled down to these.
Firstly, the film was very protracted and dull. The games themselves don’t start until what must have been well over an hour into the film. Up until that point, there’s a little tension as participants are chosen, as they get to make their first impressions and as they check out the opposition, but all of it could have been just as effective at half the length. Then the games start and while there’s quite a bit of action, what follows is disappointment after disappointment. Every single time, without fail, that there is a chance for an interesting scenario, the writing takes the easy way out. Catniss is developing maternal feelings for a young girl who saved her life? Great – what will happen when they’re the last ones left? Nope, no dilemma needs to happen because some random kills the girl. How will she survive now that she’s badly wounded? Oh, here comes a magic potion that heals her – something pretty much none of the other characters are seen getting. She’s been saved by one guy – what will happen when she meets him again? Oh, he’s been savaged by CG beasts. The rules have changed so that two winners can be declared? Oh, they’re bound to rescind that – oh, but now they have, there’s an absurd way to force an ending. At no point does it feel like characters are genuinely in fear for their lives and there’s always a cartoon solution to Catniss’ problems, and the way she pretty much never kills anyone but they manage to get killed by something peripheral so that her hands are kept clean gets really, really far-fetched.
The details are clumsy, too. There’s a tense moment where she thinks her partner has been killed, but it’s someone else, so why hasn’t her face appeared up in the sky like everyone else’s did when they died? If the trained killer boy has the element of surprise, why on earth doesn’t he carefully kill his rivals at the end? Oh, because he’s gone a bit nutty, of course. It all feels lazy and I didn’t care about a single one of the characters, except for basic ‘awww’ protective urges about the small kid for the few minutes she was onscreen. In general, Battle Royale presents far more interesting psychological dilemmas and gives a more believable version of what would happen when young people think it’s kill or be killed.
And the filmmaking was horrible, too. The one chapter of the book I read (and I no longer feel any need to read any more) had the prose style annoy me – it seemed to be drawing attention to itself by trying to be clever and elegant but failing, by trying to make its character perceptive and formidable but only making her seem arrogant and detached. While I didn’t dislike the Catniss of the film nearly so much as the book’s narrator, it seemed to me the horribly annoying filmmaking techniques were a brilliant way of mirroring the bad writing: every time there was action, the camera shook in the most absurd way, and even worse, anything vaguely creepy, unsettling or requiring a bit of anxiety had to be reflected by extreme close-ups, very tight framing and fast cuts. It all had a very Brechtian distancing effect, making it impossible to forget this was just a film and generally making the whole thing seem even more shallow than it was.
It seems a successful franchise and I don’t doubt there will be more. It makes me very, very sad that this film will likely be a successful series where His Dark Materials floundered and failed after its first film, though…
