Battle Royale 4K 2000 JAPANESE DC Ultra HD 2160p

This has not happened yet, but it will be! Very soon! This is the opinion of the ageless classic of Japanese cinema, director Kinji Fukasaku, the idol of Tarantino and John Woo. Parents will lose their jobs, and children, out of control, will perpetrate terror and a massive boycott of adults. Countermeasure: Battle Royale, a government-sanctioned brutal game in which out-of-control schoolchildren are forced to participate at gunpoint.

On a desert island, 42 teenagers will mercilessly destroy each other for 3 days in order to win. Only one player is allowed to return to the mainland alive.

The imperturbable master of the sinister game is Kitano's school teacher. The name was given to the hero by the performer of this role, the world famous cult actor and director Takeshi Kitano. Blood flows like a river, but Kitano's teacher guarantees not only compliance with the conditions of the game, but also its convention. Young heroes die, but just like in a computer "shooter".

But the moral of the film is not virtual. From a crazy electronic future, she's turned to the present day.

Battle Royale 4K Review
It's one thing for a good guy in the lead role to mow out a bunch of bad secondary guys from a machine gun that appear on the screen a second before disappearing from it forever. And it is quite different when they destroy - with fountains of blood, severed heads and ripped stomachs - almost all the heroes of the film. The fact that three out of forty-three (if you count the class together with the teacher) get out of the mess, and two of them stay alive, can be considered a rudiment, a burp of sentimental genres and a conformist concession to traditional tastes. In the name of the principle, it was necessary to kill everyone, regardless of gender, age, temperament, social status and moral qualities.

At the same time, in the case of Fukasaku, "the bloodiest" is not equal to the "most cruel", because cruelty towards the heroes does not mean cruelty towards the audience (as for the latter, here, in my opinion, Larisa Shepitko's "Ascent" remains unsurpassed and "Come and See" by Elem Klimov). In a person who is in any way able to distinguish convention from reality, "Battle Royale" exudes laughter, close to that caused by "Pulp Fiction" by Quentin Tarantino and "Outskirts" by Peter Lutsik, where epic peasants roasted their adversaries on fire, drowned them in an ice hole and gnawed with their teeth. But "Fiction" and "Outskirts" are sophisticated and aesthetic films, while "Battle" is not even consumer goods, but outright "trash", cinematographic cliches stuffed with all sorts of melodramatic clichés of Indian and Latin American origin, barbaric sprat vinaigrette with lamb and frog meat, flavored with jam, drizzled with ketchup, and decorated with rosettes of eyes and rollers of severed fingers like those sold as scarecrows. This, of course, is a banter, but a special one, where the author jokes over the characters, willingly or unwittingly giving the viewer the opportunity to make fun of him.
Everything that happens in "Battle Royale" has nothing to do with reality - and at the same time has the closest relationship to it. "Cruel future. Parents are deprived of work. Children, out of control, commit terror and mass boycotts of others. The retaliatory measure is a government-sanctioned game in which unruly schoolchildren will be forced to participate at gunpoint. 42 teenagers will be mercilessly for 3 days on a desert island. destroy each other in order to win. But only one player is allowed to return to the mainland alive "- says the film's annotation, as if deliberately emphasizing all his delirium. The trick is that this nonsense is far from accidental. As Polonius said to Claudius about Hamlet, "his madness has its own system." And half a century after the release of Salinger's story "The Catcher in the Rye", this system is especially intelligible.

The book of the American writer turned the literary world inside out, transferring its center to the soul of a neurotic teenager. (Dostoevsky, however, did it a little earlier, but not everyone noticed). All the beatniks, hippies and rebels of the sixties, all the "youth prose", all the "angry young people" and all the "Ugly Swans" of the Strugatsky brothers came out of the abyss in the rye in exactly the same way as all Russian literature once came out of the "Overcoat" Gogol. In other words, civilized mankind has listened to "The Suffering of Young Caulfield", and - where is without Radishchev? - his soul became wounded by these sufferings. And so much so that when, in the famous film by Lindsay Anderson, schoolchildren, led by the young but already great Malcolm McDowell, shot their oppressor educators from machine guns, it was perceived (I remember myself) with the greatest enthusiasm and seemed to portend unprecedented changes - of course, for the better ...
Then everyone forgot about the suffering inflicted on humanity by the young Caulfields - but only for a short time, since before William Golding's "Lord of the Flies" and Stanley Kubrick's "Clockwork Orange" with the same McDowell in the title role, there were years left arms and legs. In general, Golding did a simple thing - he recalled that morphogenesis repeats phylogeny, individual human development repeats the evolutionary path of mankind. That the notorious teenager is a beast and a savage to a much greater extent than an adult who, under the influence of culture and civilization, has hidden claws and fangs inside. Although, as the revolutions show, sweeping the cultural stratum from society and the individual (as evidenced by Andrei Platonov), he never parted with them. In Lord of the Flies, educated English children who accidentally found themselves on a desert island quickly reached the wildest state, which in the film adaptation of the novel was emphasized by a brilliant final metaphor, where the camera, looking around with the eyes of one of the teenagers, unexpectedly stuck into the boots of a naval officer. It was impossible to more accurately translate the word "descended" into the language of cinema.

"A Clockwork Orange" somewhat equalized the accents - in the first part it showed what brutalized teenagers do to people, and in the second it demonstrated what the corrective effect of a civilized society on the aggressive inclinations of the younger generation leads to. To the classic question "Who is to blame?" two answers still followed: "The dual nature of man" and "An imperfect society."
Finally, about four years ago, the overlooked film 187 (the number of the American criminal article providing for punishment for murder) was released with Sam Jackson as a teacher who, out of impotence before the atrocities of his students, took up arms and killed several villains. The picture was preceded by a symptomatic epigraph: "What happens in the United States, ten years later, usually happens all over the world." And indeed, soon Gerard Depardieu played a French teacher who faced the savagery of schoolchildren - however, of Algerian origin.
"Battle Royale" is a natural preliminary outcome of the long rollback process from Salinger, although a self-explanatory Soviet pun about getting out of the chasm in lies is inappropriate here. It is more appropriate to refer to Peter Greenaway, who has just arrived in Russia, and immediately called for the fight against the "four tyrannies of cinema" - the tyranny of the word, the tyranny of the frame, the tyranny of the camera and the tyranny of the actor. For the fifth tyranny is precisely the tyranny of the adolescent as a hero, spectator and even an indirect author of a huge number of films saturated with the consciousness of a defective adolescent.
Still from the film

In this context, Fukasaku's own references to a "brutal future", mass unemployment and bad government are complete nonsense and a purely formal concession to political correctness. The action of the film takes place in an imaginary world, and it is completely understandable whose imagination it is - adults tired of their children, civilization exhausted in the struggle with natural savagery, and most importantly - teachers, who were bothered by students. Kitano's teacher (whose surname demonstratively coincides with the actor's surname), managing the self-destruction of his class, is a blue dream, a pink dream and the shameful ideal of all teachers in the world. I was once asked to replace the teacher at the school where my stepdaughter studied. After the lesson, the head teacher came up to me and in a conspiratorial voice quietly said: "Did you notice the long one on the back?"
Noticed "- I said, not understanding what she was driving at." And what do you say? "." If between us, then a bastard. "" Listen, we can do nothing with him, and you are an outsider and not connected by anything. I ask you: go to the toilet, he smokes there now and mocks the kids - and give it to him properly. From all of us !!! ". I won't say whether I fulfilled her request, but I remembered it for the rest of my life. So," Royal Battle "is the same" from all of us ", and with great feeling. Cinema for that and cinema, to provide cultural relaxation to the accumulated aggression.

Info Blu-ray
Video
Codec: HEVC / H.265
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: HDR10
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1

Audio
Japanese: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1

Subtitles
English SDH.