Battle Royale: Book to Film

When I heard that Arrow Video had released the film Battle Royale in 4K, I was intrigued. I had heard about the book and film, and the comparisons made to The Hunger Games and such. Figuring that now was an opportune time, I read the book and then bought the 4K disc to watch the film (the 4K version is great btw, a very noticeable upgrade over the Blu Ray). There were some interesting major differences I found between the book and the movie, so I wanted to discuss them. Note: There will be *SPOILERS* for both the book and the movie.

First of all, the setup for the premise is different. In the movie, it’s an intro blurb about how the Battle Royale program was just set up at the turn of the Millennium to combat juvenile delinquency. In the book’s alternate reality, Japan had been under a totalitarian regime since after World War II, so the program had been going on for decades, and it was a part of life living under the oppressive regime. In the movie, when the class was taken to the island to participate in the “game”, they didn’t seem to know what was going on or what the program was until the instructor explained it to them. In the book, the existence of the program was known and taught in school (as part of the government propaganda teachings), so once the realization hit the kids that their class had been selected for the program, they were horrified because they knew that meant that their worst fears were being realized and that they were doomed to die. I found it to be much more effective and powerful in the book.

The instructor character was modified from the book. In the book, he was a stranger called Sakamochi. In the movie, he was a former teacher that they knew, played by the legendary Takeshi Kitano, named… Kitano. Kitano does many of the same things that Sakamochi did in the book, but the character feels quite different. I found Sakamochi to be much creepier and more disturbing, as he was some strange unknown man acting very weirdly about the whole prospect of these kids being forced to kill each other. It seems like with Kitano they were trying to maybe tone him down a little and make him more sympathetic, but it didn’t work as well for me. It also weirded me out with how he was acting really creepily towards Noriko, but I don’t know just how much of that was cultural differences. Kitano was a good choice as an actor though, and I think he could have done a good job if they had made the character Sakamochi as he was in the book. He played the Kitano character well, I just didn’t like the *character* as much. The instructional video with the Japanese-style-overly-cheery lady was pretty amusing though lol.

Another noteworthy difference was how in the movie apparently Shogo and Kazuo had just transferred into their class that day. You find out later that they apparently volunteered to participate, which makes some sense with their characters, but I liked how the book did it better. In the book, the two of them had transferred into the class *recently*, so they were still new. This meant that the rest of the class didn’t know them very well yet, and only had their prior reputations to go on, and it adds a mysteriousness to the characters where you aren’t quite sure about them yet. It also made a nice cruel twist of fate that Shogo was being forced to participate again for two years in a row (though it’s not completely clear how *entirely* “random” the selection was).

Many of the deaths and such happened in much the same way as the book, but you miss a lot of the details of the students’ personalities and backstories that make them interesting in the book. Even if a character is only in one short chapter before getting killed off, you are given a sense of what they are like and what kind of person they are in such a way that makes them feel like a real person with real feelings and such. For example, one girl is literally in the story for only two pages before getting killed, but it shows how she naively lives in a magical superhero fantasy land in her mind, so her personality still seemed interesting despite her story being so short. They definitely attempted to incorporate some of these in the movie, which was good, but I just found it much richer and more detailed in the book (which makes sense given a movie is limited by a runtime). Mitsuko’s backstory was *sorely* missing from the movie, because it gives insight into possible reasons as to why she is the way she is, but apparently they do have some scenes about that in the director’s cut so I’ll have to watch that version of the movie next time. Some of the stories were not in the movie at all, such as the boy that is tricked into wandering into a forbidden zone.

Shinji’s story being condensed down made sense that they had to do that for the movie, but I thought it did make it somewhat less effective. In the book, it goes into more detail about his plan, outsmarting the government and finding ways to work around the seemingly inescapable traps they they had been put in. It was actually quite clever, and Shinji had to go through more hardships. In the book, since the school was in a forbidden zone, he had to rig up an elaborate and complicated pulley system between two safe zones so that he could drop the bomb on the school in between them without entering the school’s forbidden zone. That just made it all the more tragic how he had gone through all that trouble to set up this smart plan that could have worked, only to have it thwarted when he was so close to being ready. In the movie he simply disabled the forbidden zones with his hacking, and was going to bring the bomb to the school (which is a sensible way to condense it down, but it greatly lessened the impact). One other random note, it was kind of disappointing that the big car chase/final showdown was left out of the movie, but I can understand how that probably would have been very expensive and complicated to film.

Despite these issues (if you can call them that), I did still enjoy the movie. I never expected it to have ALL the details from the book and I never expected it to be as good as the book, since that is usually what ends up happening with movie-to-book adaptations. The actors were all great and captured the essence of their characters really well. They still went pretty hard with the horrific violence and it didn’t feel like they particularly sanitized it or toned it down or anything, which is important to this particular story. I also really liked the use of music in the movie, and it looked very nice in terms of cinematography, atmosphere, special effects, etc. I would still recommend this movie, but I would recommend also reading the book along with it.