Fight the Future 15 - Battle Royale

Dan and Paul take an in-depth look at the worlds portrayed Young Adult dystopian fiction.
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Fight the Future 15 - Battle Royale

Postby Paul » 12 Oct 2015, 08:21

Who was in your class in grade 10? If you were all stuck on an island with automatic weapons and forced to fight each other to the death, who would be your allies, and who your enemies - and who would turn out to be a psycho? Dan and Paul ask each other that, and talk about the film where this scenario plays out: the bloody live action Japanese film Battle Royale. Which is actually pretty different from The Hunger Games.
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Re: Fight the Future 15 - Battle Royale

Postby winterpanda » 12 Oct 2015, 15:34

I think the book was more violent than the movie.

Things I barely remember are the teacher didn't want her students take part, the collars also exploded if you are in a certain zone, and some of the students' background was more elaborated.There were also themes of rape and child prostitution.

Great podcast!
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Re: Fight the Future 15 - Battle Royale

Postby DaMage » 12 Oct 2015, 19:08

You were talking about the soldiers in WW1 that would tell their enemy to go back so they didn't have to shoot them. Last week on the Great War youtube channel (a week-by-week coverage of WW1) they talked about the battle of loos, where German machine gunners stop firing because of how many British were dying. Here is a link to tat part of the video: https://youtu.be/JoWBYnYhL4I?t=4m19s
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Re: Fight the Future 15 - Battle Royale

Postby Zyme » 12 Oct 2015, 22:59

Hunger games, A.K.A. I swear I didn't read Battle Royale before I published.

DaMage wrote:You were talking about the soldiers in WW1 that would tell their enemy to go back so they didn't have to shoot them. Last week on the Great War youtube channel (a week-by-week coverage of WW1) they talked about the battle of loos, where German machine gunners stop firing because of how many British were dying. Here is a link to tat part of the video: https://youtu.be/JoWBYnYhL4I?t=4m19s


I love that series so much they are doing such an excellent job.

If you are interested in the first war I would recomend anyone check out Blueprint for Armageddon by Dan Carlin in the Hardcore History Series. Thourghly excellent and well worth the time.
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Re: Fight the Future 15 - Battle Royale

Postby SoSo_Tsundere » 13 Oct 2015, 07:39

I'm not sure if this makes me want to see the movie or not!

I've been avoiding it for years, since I read the book when it first came out in English and it had a huge impact. I was just about to leave high school, school shootings were still very new and shocking in the US news, and the atmosphere was charged. It was a perfect "bubble popper" for a bookish, angry loner ostracized and isolated because of biology, and really helped deflate any hostile thoughts by showing the realities and repercussions of violence.

The book Battle Royale is very much worth a read, and the movie seems to miss a lot. The book's setting is an alternate history Japan with no WW2, where the militaristic government of the early Showa still holds sway. Trade with the US is minimal, with rock music being smuggled in to teen rebels. Society is otherwise very close to current Japan, though social control is more overt and the police are outright brutal.

There is no real "teen rebellion", the programs for schoolkids to murder each other are military social experiments to discover the ideal weapons and tactics for sudden urban combat, and to study how to make killers of the entire population if invaded. The island is divided into grids, with a grid going out of bounds every couple of hours to keep kids moving (and to avoid them attacking the soldiers/control, a major plot point in the book). As for the kids, the "ringer" student was not a volunteer, but a survivor who was reassigned to a new school and caught up again in the random selection. He is actually rather helpful to the protagonists. There are cliques and two primary instigators, a sociopathic girl gang leader (the very brief sex references come primarily from her, she forced a girl in her group to prostitute herself), and a mob boss's (or samurai clan leader? can't remember) son. Otherwise the book deals mainly with the incredible stress all the kids are under, and how they manage to cope and survive. There are numerous flashbacks to show how the rest of society has the same stress from the brutal and corrupt government, and the importance of freedom and individuality that traditional Japanese culture doesn't support.

Anyway, I highly suggest the book! Keep up the great work, Dan and Paul!
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Re: Fight the Future 15 - Battle Royale

Postby 7SecondsLeft » 13 Oct 2015, 08:54

So glad you both managed to watch and cover this in the podcast. Battle Royale is one of my favouritest films, despite some logic flaws in the story - I actually like the way the film doesn't spend too much time explaining the backstory, as you know the more answers they try and give, the more questions they end up raising.

I saw the film again recently, and everytime I see it, I end up losing even more respect for Hunger Games. Sure there's an understandable difference in visible violence between the films (even comic-book violence against children is a hard sell now), but that's largely irrelevant. As you identified in the podcast, HG has no sense of trauma, no hint of people questioning what's going on, no one reacting in a way that makes sense for the situation, no actual weight to anything, it is just too sanitised and fluffy. "I can save the world, and still have time to look pretty and choose between two hunky boyfriends" barf. I think that someone could do a PG cut of Battle Royale to take out the splatter, maybe lose the happy ending as well, and it'll still end up being the better film.

As for the question at the end, I'm not sure if I'd be one of the people who would die super-early, or after getting warmed up taking out the classmates who totally deserved it, ending up being one of the winners! ;)

SoSo_Tsundere wrote:I'm not sure if this makes me want to see the movie or not!

I've been avoiding it for years, since I read the book when it first came out in English and it had a huge impact. I was just about to leave high school, school shootings were still very new and shocking in the US news, and the atmosphere was charged. It was a perfect "bubble popper" for a bookish, angry loner ostracized and isolated because of biology, and really helped deflate any hostile thoughts by showing the realities and repercussions of violence.


It does sound like I really need to get around to read the book. I've had the manga on my shelf for years, but for some reason never read it. I usually get distracted by something shinier and forget to go back to it :)
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Re: Fight the Future 15 - Battle Royale

Postby SixFootTurkey » 14 Oct 2015, 13:25

The books are different, but that does not make BR inherently superior to HG.
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Re: Fight the Future 15 - Battle Royale

Postby Daniel » 14 Oct 2015, 13:57

Thanks for these thoughts, especially @SoSo_Tsundere's awesome description of the more complete picture of the world in the book! Once again I wish we had the time to always do both the book and the movie. But I think the movie stands well on its own, even if it makes not a lot of literal sense.

@7SecondsLeft Hunger Games eventually does get into quite a bit about PTSD, but I agree that it's way too orderly and fluffy along the way. It took a lot of skill and finesse for Susanna Clarke to make this horrific scenario into palatable escapist entertainment, but I'm not so sure it's something to be proud of.

@SixFootTurkey On the other hand I still like The Hunger Games a lot (heck, superhero movies make violent patriotic vigilantes palatable to me), especially from the second installment on, and I have to say the acting and character writing are way more solid than in Battle Royale.
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Re: Fight the Future 15 - Battle Royale

Postby SixFootTurkey » 14 Oct 2015, 14:53

That's what I meant. Battle Royale may deal with some of the micro aspects of emotional trauma better - especially when you've known the others your whole life - but doing one aspect better doesn't make the book better.

I haven't read the Battle Royale book, so I can't go into specifics about what I feel the Hunger Games have done better, but I also found the series to be quite compelling, and enjoyed the more macro level of political elements that were added into the mix, as well as seeing how the nation was changed by their actions. From what I've heard about Battle Royale, while the book may go into more depth than the film, it doesn't add any more depth. (Yes it gives some backstory to explain it, but it doesn't explore it.)

@7secondsleft
The violence is the point of the plot of Battle Royale, and that's fine. That the Hunger Games chooses not to focus on that aspect should not be taken as a point against it. You may not like it, and that's fine, but to 'lose respect' for a piece of art because it doesn't follow exactly how a piece that did likely inspire it, while at the same time belittling it for being 'too similar' is kind of silly.
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Re: Fight the Future 15 - Battle Royale

Postby 7SecondsLeft » 15 Oct 2015, 02:37

It's not about the violence, and despite all the splatter porn, I don't actually think violence is the point of Battle Royale. My problem is more based around the expectation that characters should behave in an appropriate manner for the environment they're in.

For me in the case of BR, this means that how the children react is more important than "Cool, he got a knife in the head!". You get a very real sense that the children are all different characters, struggling to cope with an oppressive and scary situation, in very different ways - some panic, some get suicidal, some go all gung-ho, some try and hide it out, some try to go it alone, some try and work as a team, etc, but it feels real. Battle Royale works for me in a similar manner to something like Lord of the Flies, which is a book which I absolutely love. The overly gory violence is just an added element that enhances it (if you like that type of thing), not the underlying point.

With Hunger Games however, apart from the little bit at the start where they all go "Please don't kill the cute little girl", there's none of that, and you end up with a situation where the Games themselves are pretty much just plot window-dressing. Maybe it's just because the stories focus too closely on Katniss (who's entire strategy seems to hide and manipulate the media with a fake romance, just to avoid actually killing someone - go "Team Strong Female"!), and all the actual character stuff happens off page.

As it stands though, you could almost get the same story with the same weight and risk by replacing the plot with something like this: "12 teenagers enter a competition at the local mall to win the perfect Prom Night outfit, while avoiding fiendish obstacles, mall security, and getting poisoned in the food court. Meanwhile, the indie stores on the local high street start a rebellion against the evil corporation that owns the mall, to bring money back into the town and teach people that there's more to shopping than Gap and McDonalds."

In short (whoops, sorry), it's fine that the Hunger Games doesn't focus on the trauma and the violence. It is however a problem for me that it barely acknowledges the realities of the world it established, and feels like the characters are just spending another normal day in normalsville. My comment about "losing respect" were poorly chosen over-dramatic words, but I am annoyed it took another viewing of BR before I realised exactly what it was that was missing from HG.

Oh, and I didn't belittle it for being too similar to BR, I belittled it for the typical YA "pretty girl chooses hunky boyfriend" trope ;)
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Re: Fight the Future 15 - Battle Royale

Postby SixFootTurkey » 15 Oct 2015, 11:11

There is so much in there I want to respond to, but I'm going to (try to) stick to a few points so I can try to focus on them for now. Before I get any deeper though, you still have an incongruous argument, where you dislike that the characters are 'too okay with the killing going on' right alongside arguing that the MC should be trying harder to kill people... That and the 'it could be a movie about being in a mall' is just straight nonsense, I'd hope I won't have to go into detail here, but I can.

The story focuses on Katniss, that's true. (Well, it has a macro focus with Katniss as the primary lens.) As a YA book, it is likely targeted at an audience that wants to be able to put themselves into the story. This is much harder to do in a work that is a broader social commentary. Since we're focusing more on Katniss, we don't get the luxury of following around other pov characters constantly to see how they react; though we do still get tangential evidence, and more of it when her interaction with others - the other victors, etc - increases in the other books.

The difference you seem to be glossing over, is that the Hunger Games are a known quantity for these kids. They aren't thrown from a 'normal life' into a room and told to kill each other. They live with this reality daily, with constant reminders, that any year they might be chosen for this event. Past events have all been televised, you have previous victors advising you, and you are otherwise bombarded with the reality in the time before the games; you know there's no way out of it. While the general premise of 'put kids in room, only one walks out' is there in both, the actual handling of that plot point is so drastically different. To compare any single element of the two in a vacuum is doing both a huge disservice.

The first few districts also have volunteers; they've been preparing for this event their entire lives, raised in a subculture that romanticizes the games. They go into the games knowing exactly what they have to do; of course the victors don't always end up as happy as they expected. It's these same contestants that necessitate Peeta and Katniss's strategies (survive, join, etc). Personally, I love that a meta has developed within the games, and that Collins touches on how this meta has shifted. The current meta - packs of careers - means that an untrained individual from a lesser district can't hope to compete with their firepower.

It also feels a bit like you are taking the first book out of a trilogy, and then asking why it didn't get to things that are far more subtle than you are giving credit (PTSD, long term stressors, etc).
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Re: Fight the Future 15 - Battle Royale

Postby Daniel » 15 Oct 2015, 12:05

Six foot turkey replied to this before I could post this, anyway:

The big difference is that the Hunger Games are deeply woven into the society, and have been for the last 75 years. Everyone knows exactly what to expect. There's just the career tributes, and then dead meat. And the career tributes have watched every minute of every game on video replay. They feel prepared. Even more so than real-life soldiers, who often have no idea what the fighting will physically be like. That's why the death of Cato (which we talk about) is the best moment in the whole movie: only at his end does the reality punch through, that he's not inside a highlight reel being watched at a training session: it's really *him*, and he's really going to *die*.

So I'm of two minds about it: it's harder to relate to their mindsets for sure, that kind of acceptance, but at the same time it does create this eerie otherness of the futuristic world, and lots of opportunities for ironic commentary about how a culture can fully integrate things that are so outrageous.

And yet it also flattens it. It's quite convenient for making the premise into something easier to sell - a bit like a videogame, or a battle between two summer camps.
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Re: Fight the Future 15 - Battle Royale

Postby SixFootTurkey » 15 Oct 2015, 13:15

I will admit, that part of my response is tied to my knowing the books. I'll agree the film tends to leave out or cut back some of the parts that are 'boring' (read: not action), so they skip over some of the explanations behind how/why things are happening the way they are.

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