It’s been 25 years since Battle Royale first came out, and its vast media legacy is ubiquitous. This year alone has seen the release of Squid Game‘s final season and The Long Walk‘s long-anticipated adaptation. The second Hunger Games prequel (and the sixth in that series) is set for release at the end of next year. From The Purge series to Ready or Not to The Belko Experiment, Kinji Fukusaku’s exercise in cynical brutality remains entrenched in the zeitgeist as much for its absurdist conception of violence as its reflection of a society that continues to gamify the very act of survival.

Even outside the sports-adjacent crowd, there has been a steady stream of films that bleakly wonder how we might fare in the apocalypse. General morale is low these days. Young people are inheriting a deteriorating planet with limited resources, and the rich and powerful are only getting more so; the gap between the wealthiest population and the rest has never been wider. Battle Royale, for all of its genre trappings, is a mirror to the nefarious pitting of regular folks against regular folks. Instead of battling the powers that be, we’re stuck pointing fingers at people whose struggles are the same as ours.

Battle Royale’s Legacy Is Bloody, Cynical & Distinctly Sad

Fukasku’s film is notably different from some of its more recent offspring, namely in the utter lack of remuneration awaiting its competition winner. Squid Game promises a sky-high payout; The Hunger Games winner gets access to the mountaintop. The participants here are 9th graders, captured and forced into a blood sport. Philosophically, the world of The Long Walk may be forcing its younger generation into killing each other, but that competition, as well as the others in Battle Royale‘s long lineage, is voluntary.

The world of Battle Royale is one of intense economic strife. Unemployment is ballooning, with ten million out of work. In a form of drastic exculpation, the now totalitarian Japanese government has drafted the Battle Royale Act, in which groups of junior high school students are chosen, at random, every year, to battle to the death. Its mission is pre-punishment, retribution against an innocent population whose only crime is skepticism of the adult world that has been left for them.

The film’s opening credits inform us that 800,000 students are boycotting, and that the B.R. Act has been passed out of fear of the younger generation. And thereby, Fukasaku hangs a tale. Unwilling to look themselves in the mirror, the government turns on the most innocent they can find to carry the burden of blame.

This year’s randomly chosen class includes Shuya Nanahara (Tatsuya Fujiwara), who had already been coping with the loss of his mother when he found his father having hanged himself on the first day of 7th grade. Other than Noriko Nakagawa (Aki Maeda), Class B, to which Shuya belongs, has collectively decided to skip class one day and run ragged through the halls. As their teacher, Kitano (Takeshi Kitano), exits the room, he is slashed on his hamstring by a sprinting student.

Random acts of violence are everywhere. “The world went crazy,” Shuya says, in voiceover. But “no matter how crazy the world became, we all managed to have fun.” Life does indeed move on despite the world around us, and, just as Shuya and Noriko are about to fly out of this place, they are all drugged on a class trip, dragged to a deserted island, and slapped with metallic collars around their necks. When they wake up, Kitano is there, too, with a new lesson: “You kill each other off until there’s only one of you left.“

Despite its bleakness, Battle Royale actually suggests that, if we are all bound to die, perhaps it is better to look after each other…

In the game’s early stages, Fukasaku and cinematographer Katsumi Yanagijima formally mirror their characters’ abundant confusion with a roving camera, discovering the chaos as the kids do. Quick cuts from editor Hirohide Abe are jarring, never quite letting us orient ourselves in any one scene. For the children, most jarring of all is a bizarre, pseudo-comic explainer video in which a young woman in a bright orange shirt, camo skirt and studded belt explains, in exaggerated chipperness, the “rules” of the game, most of which boils down to: there aren’t any, just don’t die and don’t do anything “naughty” or we’ll explode your head.

Battle Royale makes those media that come after it look tame by comparison. The violence and gore are extraordinary. Blood spurts in vicious fountains. The deaths vacillate between uncomfortably funny and devastatingly maudlin. And through it all, Kenta Fukasaku (Kenji’s son, who wrote the screenplay), laces in middle school melodrama throughout. These are children; their struggles are those of children, so are their hopes and their dreams. That Mitsuko (Ko Shibasaki) spends time reapplying makeup between kills is not evidence of her sociopathy, but that she is a teenager exploring her gender expression. Other kids talk about crushes between escapes for survival.

The melodrama of their traditional teenage lives gives the film its utter devastation. They are budding adults who are only now learning what it is they may want out of life. They are learning how their bodies work and how they might want to relate to others.

The Fukasakus give us options. Given these uncommon circumstances, do you fight against the odds? Do you attempt to start a revolution by fighting the system? Do you decamp in seclusion and await your inevitable fate? Do you refuse to participate in the dystopian plans of your elders and take your own life?

In one scene, a student pleads with Chigusa (Chiaki Kuriyama) to have sex, with the argument that losing her virginity is important before certain death. Misogynistic though he is, his question raises another question: if you know your chances of survival are at best one in 42, what should you do with your time? Chigusa stabs him repeatedly in the genitals as a reply.

As Shuya and Noriko wend their way through this strangely bucolic island, the images of death become strangely innocuous. Too much exposure to anything becomes numbing after a while, and in that inurement, Fukasaku lays down a subtler message of the dangers of exposure. If this is what our world decides is normal, hope for the future generation seems lost. “Why not kill?” Mitsuko asks during one battle. “Everyone has their issues.“

So much of the current zeitgeist is reflective of a world where we are forced to fight against each other instead of the powers that be. Rather than being permitted to challenge the gatekeepers, we turn on each other in desperation to survive. And yet, communities continue regardless. Little pockets of solidarity thrive in spite of the circumstances. Shuya’s devotion to protecting Noriko; Kawada (Taro Yamamoto) offering them cooked food and medical supplies; the girls banding together in a shack where “everyone is welcome.“

Despite its bleakness, Battle Royale actually suggests that, if we are all bound to die, perhaps it is better to look after each other rather than bury our friends for want of another hour on this earth.

Battle Royale returns to theaters from October 12, 13, and 15.