| 4500+ Great Links | My Review of Battle Royale |
| Copyright © 2009 by Zack Smith. All rights reserved.
Acting: *****
While some may think of this movie, directed by Kinji Fukasaku, written by Kenta Fukasaku, based on a novel by Koushun Takami, as tawdry entertainment or a bizarre horror flick, it is really not so different from the state of the youth today. Every week we encounter news stories of youth violence. One day they are rioting, for instance in Paris or New Zealand. The next we hear of gun violence in schools in the USA, Finland, Germany or elsewhere. And then we hear about the more frequent acts of barbarism of young criminal gangs. Or we learn of bullying in British schools. Rarely we hear of mobs of youths attacking older adults to steal from them. Our societies want to sweep of this all under the rug or into the prisons. It's not that simple, however. The truth is, there is a violent tendency in our youth today internationally. Young people have been trained to show no respect, to be demanding of their parents for products they want, to have an enormous sense of entitlement to money, products, jobs and entertainment. They expect and demand attention. They are tools, through and through, of the corporate marketers, even when they are poor and perhaps moreso. And yet, the pillars of legitimate authority have all fallen away. We can no longer trust the US government or any government. Not after outrageous instances of evil and corruption such as the obvious and half-baked cover-ups of the JFK assassination and CIA/Mossad involvement in causing 9/11. We would be fools to trust the churches and their sex-abusing, prostitute-renting priests. Nor were the media ever trustworthy, not in the days of Fox News, but more accurately not after the bankers bought control of the media decades ago. And even academia has become full of politically-correct sell-outs and a stinking pit of hypocritical, depraved careerism. No wonder then that youths are in a state of agitation, of immorality, when even and perhaps especially the religious ones are completely unethical. No wonder that violent video games are so appealing. We live at a time of great injustice, immense greed and narcissism, parentless and rudderless children, in an age when all standards have fallen away because they are illegitimate. In this context, the film is more of a simulation of what could happen. We are not too far from it. At a time when governments like the USA and Israel are quietly or obviously constructing concentration camps, respectively, when freedom and democracy are under attack, Battle Royale is more than just entertainment, it is a warning in disguise. Links
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