By JOHN CARTER JR.
Life’s not fair. That being said, there are two kinds of unfairness – the kind that is unavoidable and naturally occurring and the kind that is inflicted through injustice and oppression.
An example of the former would be a tornado or cancer that won’t go away after treatment, while an example of the latter could be the murder of an unsuspecting person walking home from work to the bombing of innocent Palestinian children.
In a country where the youth have gotten out of control, the government establishes a new program in an attempt to humble them and reduce delinquency. Every year, one class in Japan is selected to participate in a killing game, wherein students are required to slay their fellow classmates in order to survive until there is one student left standing.
The students are fooled into thinking they are going on a field trip but unbeknownst to them, they are gassed and taken to a remote location where the battle will take place. Regardless of the stated intentions, there is no justice or fairness in forcing non-consenting people into murdering each other. However, it doesn’t matter. Anyone with power can do what they want regardless of an apparent shared morality, right? Because life’s unfair.
Based on the 1999 novel of the same name, Battle Royale directed by Kinji Fukasaku stars Tatsuya Fujiwara, Aki Maeda, Tarō Yamamoto, Takeshi Kitano and Kou Shibasaki and tells the story of the aforementioned dystopian Japan.
The film is among one of the most influential films in the “death game” action thriller subgenre, along with the likes of Saw, Danganronpa, Future Diary, The Hunger Games, Alice In Borderland and Squid Game. While one of the main themes across all these properties is the battle between hope and despair, especially clear in Danganronpa, there is another connective theme that is important to analyze.
Injustice or unfairness is a common facet of these stories. While most of the antagonists of these stories would argue life’s not fair, the stories would paint a bigger image of how the lack of fairness in life is an injustice. Willful unevening of the playing field is completely different from the naturally occurring instances of unfairness in life.
In The Hunger Games and Squid Game, economic disadvantages are both examined injustices, the reason the antagonists in these stories determine they have the right to do this is because they believe their station to be higher in society. While in Saw and Danganronpa, it is their captors that determine the confines of what is fair or morally right (with Jigsaw from Saw having a distinct moral ideology that eliminated his cognitive dissonance about his crimes and justified his continued oppressive actions, while Junko Enoshima of Danganronpa has no dissonance to begin with given her morality being based of a Nihilistic despair ideology she determines she has the right to oppress simply because she can).
Regardless of their explanation and whether or not those antagonists believe it is their right or not to be the arbiter of such injustice, they still take it upon themselves to be the avatar of oppression for their respective protagonists. In the case of Battle Royale, the justification of their oppression is to make an example to curb delinquency and make model citizens out of their students.
Like in those other stories it is the participants’ recognition that participating in a game they had no choice in (that risks their life) is needless oppression, they are not willing to be complacent to what counters the inflicted unfairness.
What makes Battle Royale stand out among its fellow Death Game counterparts in terms of its non-thematic components is its location, cast, action sequences, drama, motivations and more. The island the games are located on not only gives an isolated feeling from a society that has forsaken this class of students, but also through its props and outfit design gave the look of war or military films of the 1970s and ‘80s. The heavy green color palette of the film is appealing and balances well with the environments we are set in.
Seeing students play out the roles of soldiers, survivors and victims while the whole time being forced to participate by Japanese soldiers (and their homeroom teacher) was interesting to see. The action sequences are high stakes but have layered darkness that permeates throughout the film.
When the backstory of each student is made apparent to the audience, the intensity of the injustices, hardships or challenges they had to overcome just to be here in this moment gets higher. These students know the unfairness of life, both in terms of the naturally occurring kind and the kind that is unjustly inflicted. They can recognize how the reasoning for bringing them here was simply to validate their injustice and that it wasn’t the students who failed society, but society failed its children.
The Death Game subgenre brings up a plethora of questions concerning the reality of the human experience. This can include who people truly are when it comes to their life and the life of another, despair and the hope that can overcome it, or even the power people have over our lives that we don’t even know but blindly give them.
Battle Royale examines how often people are pitted against each other by people with a higher station of power. It demonstrates this pitting is something people mustn’t be complacent to. It is about recognizing we do have agency and in order to take our power back from oppressors, we must not play their violent games and abstain from following their commands. The way to survive a death game is to not play it.
While defiance to an oppressive force might have its consequences, whether this be a school bully or some entity grander, we cannot say we are truly free if we are coerced into action through the threat of our lives, taking away our happiness or a disregard for our consent.