(via: wikipedia)
So, while everyone else was watching The Hunger Games this weekend, I stayed at home and watched Battle Royale. It's a Japanese film made in 2000, based on the novel of the same name (The Hunger Games was published in 2008...I'm just saying...).
It starts out by explaining that the economy is in a tailspin and basically the world is going to hell. This sparks the government to enact the B.R. Act (Battle Royale), that randomly picks a class of school kids, ships them off to an abandoned island, and makes them kill off each other one by one until only one is left. Sound familiar? Yeah I thought so.
Now, I haven't read The Hunger Games or seen the film, so I can't speak to how far the similarities go. In Battle Royale, each kid has a collar on that tracks their every move. The catch of the "game" is that if more than one kid is still alive once time is up, the collars will explode and they'll all die. The movie follows the kids taking each other out, and I'm willing to bet it's a little more violent and graphic than The Hunger Games.
It was a really great movie (in subtitles of course). I do want to read The Hunger Games and see the movie eventually, but I must admit that I'm probably going to be a bit partial to the Japanese version.
so i've read all 3 hunger games and watched the movie as well, then finally got the chance to watch BR. It does have it's similarities yet each has it's own uniqueness. I find BR pretty hilarious yet brutal. I still need to see the second part of BR.
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