The 2000 film Battle Royale was not my first encounter with the story. It originated as a Japanese novel in 1999, and I came across the manga adaptation at the Spartanburg County Library and read through it in my early twenties. I remember watching the film sometime in the early 2010s, most likely renting it from Netflix back when they still mailed physical DVDs. Americans tend to be largely indifferent to films from other countries, which is not exactly true the other way around, but this particular movie was bold and provocative enough that Quentin Tarantino came across it and it became one of his all-time favorites. Suzanne Collins, for her part, strongly denies ever having encountered the film, book, or manga before The Hunger Games came out a few years later.

The movie is set in a dystopian near-future Japan that has become a totalitarian one-party state with the peculiar governing priority of televising the mass murder of ninth graders. I am mildly surprised North Korea has not had a similar idea, because I have a hard time believing Kim Jong Un is unaware that either this story or The Hunger Games exists.

A class of ninth grade students are gassed unconscious on a bus and wake up on a remote island wearing explosive collars around their necks. They are informed they are participating in The Program, something they have at least theoretical knowledge of, presumably assuming through sheer statistical odds that it would never actually happen to them. If I had been a ninth grader in this universe I would have been calling out sick for every single field trip without exception.

In the manga, and possibly in the novel I never read, the class’s original teacher is killed because he refused to go along with sending his students into a massacre. The film takes a different approach. Here, Kitano is actually their teacher, and he is entirely on board with the government’s agenda. Safe to say, nobody was bringing him apples.

The concept is genuinely brilliant in its brutality. The students are told plainly that only one will be allowed to survive. Danger zones activate the collar devices to prevent anyone from simply hiding out the entire time. The weapons distributed to each student are completely random, which ensures nothing but chaos. There are moments, though, where the logic of who lets who live and why gets a little murky outside of whatever temporary alliances happen to form.

There are two major antagonists worth discussing. The first, Mitsuko Souma, left a stronger impression on me in the manga than she does in the film. She is a sadistic character with an impressive body count throughout the program, but her storyline in the movie is considerably more compressed than in the manga, which gives her a much darker and more developed backstory.

The second is Kazuo Kiriyama, who was changed from the source material for the film. Here he is not part of the original class at all but instead someone who volunteered to participate specifically because he wanted to kill people. Katniss Everdeen also technically volunteered in The Hunger Games, but she did it to save her sister from certain death, which is a rather different motivation. The idea of someone willingly signing up for a game where the weapons are random and you are heavily outnumbered is difficult to wrap your head around, but he functions well as an antagonist regardless. He is considerably more menacing in the manga than the film manages to convey.

If you are looking for something to watch around Halloween, this is a solid recommendation. It is more grounded and more viscerally brutal than The Hunger Games, even if the production values do not come close to matching a major Hollywood franchise. On balance I prefer Battle Royale, though The Hunger Games did a much better job with its sequels. A sequel to this film does exist, following the survivors of the original, and it is genuinely one of the worst things I have ever seen.