In a fictional Japanese future, forty-two eighth grade students are drugged and dropped off on a remote island under the BR act to fight to the death until only one remains.
Based on a book and often compared to "The Hunger Games" or "Lord of the Flies" some find this interpretation of setting children against each other to be shocking and unsettling. Unfortunately for me, as I find with a lot of the import titles I watch, I felt like I was culturally lost... that the meaning would be much more rich for me if I understood the culture better.
There's no denying that this is no sanitized version of child violence like "Hunger Games"... the blood and violence hit fast and hard, and there are copious amounts of both. In the first few minutes, you see a teacher kill two students just to prove the situation is serious and real. There are spraying bloody headshots, severed limbs, blindness, bombs, and all-out cat-fights. The kind with blades. Despite its more mature treatment, however, I just couldn't get into it.
We're supposed to care about some of these kids, hate some others, but the character development is just too flat and superficial. They talk a lot about who has a crush on whom, and one kid dropped out of school just to come back for the special field trip at the end of term (lucky him!) but despite that, I just can't seem to care about any of them.
Some say that these movies are an allegory for sending your child off to school... we lump them together into a pack and force them to compete through test scores or athletic performance, or both. One always comes out on top.
As a knitter's entertainment while crafting, this is terrible. It's the subtitles, of course, but also there's a lot of fast paced action you have to pay attention to or you will miss something. There are a few long stretches of hiking, and a musical montage related to some computer hacking, but they're rare and nothing to base getting anything done on.
Three out of five stars for me. Two holy-crap moments over some particularly nasty gore, and some tampon related dialogue that was just too much. I wanted to like it a lot more, I just couldn't. Maybe if they'd had fewer students so they could flesh out the main ones better, I might have rated it higher. Tarantino called it his favorite movie in the last twenty years, so why am I judging? It's worth the time to watch it if you like these kinds of gore-fests though. I just happen to like a bit more substance in my killers.
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