Director: Kinji Fukasaku
Year Released: 2000
Rating: 3.0
Here's a ditty you won't find being released in America anytime soon: Japan's take on both America and Japan's wayward youth culture (or, more generally, the social frustration of teenagers allowed to transform itself into other-directed violence). Students from a high school are "supposed" to be going on a field-trip, but end up collared with explosive neck harnesses (think The Running Man) and forced to fight for survival on an island (think The Most Dangerous Game), the last one standing allowed to keep his/her life. There is a reversal of forms of reality: "video game" reality is substituted for "real" life, and "existence" for these students turns into something by id Software (Doom, Quake) where they have to roam around, collecting weapons, "power-ups" (GPS systems, bulletproof vests), and either take a defensive stance (refuse to fight) and join forces with others or turn aggressive (some girls decide to turn a lighthouse into a substitute "home," in complete denial over the seriousness of the tournament). Fantastic and timely psychological study, but (after my first viewing) I'm not entirely clear as to what the 'moral' of it is (I kept picking up conflicting answers) and where Fukasaku stands on all this somewhat-fascist carnage (I kept saying to myself that this has to be a satire - he can't be serious). It could have used a longer introduction (rather than just a few lines of text) to go more in-depth as to why the government decided to start systematically killing off its "useless" citizens (think Stalin, think Mussolini, think Hitler).
