Battle Royale (2000)

Battle Royale arrives from the year 2000 with a collar around its neck and a body count that renders most subsequent cultural hand-wringing redundant. Its dystopia is a totalitarian Japanese government that ships a ninth-grade class to an island and instructs the students to kill one another. The target of the film's scorn is generational and institutional: adults who lie to children, a teacher rejected by his own daughter, a state that treats its young as disposable. That is an old complaint, and it is not a complaint about markets. The film has no interest in class, capital, or the distribution of wealth. It has interest in a man in a tracksuit eating cookies while children die.

The cast is entirely Japanese, with an unusually large roster of young women given weapons, grudges, and screen time. This is a function of the source material and the national cinema it belongs to, not a casting brief written in a conference room. Nothing in the film engages race as a subject, and nothing engages queerness, climate, or body image. Mitsuko Souma's abuse and the sociopathy that follows are staged as tragedy and horror, which is where the film leaves them, unaffirmed and unclaimed.

Fukasaku called his film a fable and described it as words to the next generation, which sounds like a lecture and plays like a slaughterhouse. The moralizing sits inside the violence and is never extracted for our convenience. We are left with a film of faint social consciousness and no sermon at all, a rare vintage that has aged into mere provocation. We have classified it accordingly, and we will now lie down.