Battle Royale

Set in a Japan sliding toward social collapse, Battle Royale imagines a government program designed to discipline a generation of unruly teenagers. Each year, one school class is selected at random, taken to a deserted island and forced into a lethal contest: the students must eliminate one another within three days, and only one of them is permitted to leave alive. Supplied with provisions and a random weapon apiece, the classmates must decide whether to trust each other or turn on each other, while their former teacher Kitano oversees the game for the authorities.

Kinji Fukasaku directed the film, the fifteenth of the sixteen features he made in chronological order, following Crest of Betrayal and preceding Battle Royale II: Requiem. His son Kenta Fukasaku wrote the screenplay and also produced alongside him and Kimio Kataoka. Tatsuya Fujiwara and Aki Maeda play the central students Shuya Nanahara and Noriko Nakagawa, with Takeshi Kitano as Kitano, Taro Yamamoto, Masanobu Ando and Ko Shibasaki among a credited cast of eighty-three. Made for about five million dollars, the film holds a 7.5 rating on IMDb from roughly 206,000 votes and a 7.3 on TMDB from a much smaller pool of about 4,000, while a critics' score of 7.7 from fifty-one reviews places it slightly above both audience measures.