Battle Royale

[wuaffiliate]

Has anyone seen Battle Royale and Battle Royale 2?

At the moment i have seen the first one twice and i really enjoyed it, the characters kept me attracted to the film the whole time. The interactions between the characters is what makes this movie very good to me. It seems to natual, i dont know why all of these japanese kids are such good actors.

Edit: japanese chicks are hot.

[Bram]

There has been a rather lengthy topic on this over here some time ago (possibly on the old boards), and: no.

[jpmeyer]

It's probably because most of the kids weren't trained actors and because they really were around that age, rather than having someone who's 27 say that they're 16.

[Razvan]

Battle Royale is one of the best movies of all time. It has cool characters, some hot girls, a lot of weapons, killing, blood, mayhem... you know, the ingridients of a good movie. I saw it about 20 times or so.

I got Battle Royale 2 about one year ago, right when it came out, but it was Japanese only (with subtitles in Korean, or some such bizarre setting, and really bad english, but only in the first 40 minutes, afterwards, there was none). 2 days ago, my friend loaned me his copy, I didn't get a chance to watch it yet.

So far, it's a lot worse than the first one. The story's worse, the characters are worse (you don't really care about any of them, unlike the first one), way too chaotic, way too many die way too fast, stupid rules, etc... I gotta watch the last 40 minutes too... but I am disappointed.

[wuaffiliate]

It's less about the rules and just about the killing basically in the second BR. I do agree the characters are just not as good as the first, but then again the second was directed by someone else.

[Jacob Orlove]

It's probably because most of the kids weren't trained actors and because they really were around that age, rather than having someone who's 27 say that they're 16.

Is BR still your favorite movie, jp?

[jpmeyer]

Yeah, although I like the manga more than the movie (but I like the movie more than the book.)  The book and manga are cool, because in them the main character is shifted from Nanahara to Mimura and Sugimura, respectively.  At one point in the manga, it goes for three whole books before returning back to Nanahara's story.

The thing about BR2 is that it's not paced properly.  I thought that the action scenes were hella sweet and all, but then once they get to the middle it goes on too long before they have another one and it throws off the rhythm that they had going.  Thus, you get antsy during the character building and care less about them.

There is a new cut of BR2 that was released in theatres in Japanland, but they delayed the DVD release of it because of Nevada Girl, who was a big fan of BR.  That cut is supposed to do a better job with the character development, although I haven't seen it.

[Razvan]

The book (novel) is also a bit more developped, with Mimura being at least as big a character as Nanahara (until he dies). The manga is also a lot more violent, so that's a plus.

[wuaffiliate]

i must find the manga

[jpmeyer]

Your best bet is probably to buy it online.  It's actually kind of hard trying to find the volumes at places like Borders and Barnes and Noble for some reason.  I think I had to go to four different bookstores before I found this month's volume.

[Vegeta2711]

The lighthouse scene in the manga ended up great. Oda also gets it differently in the Manga than the movie or book.

[Magi]

i must find the manga

It can't be too hard to find a torrent of it floating around

[jpmeyer]

I was able to find the first 4-5 books pretty easily, but I haven't been able to find anything since then.