For the few uninformed The Hunger Games takes place in a fictional land where, as recompense for uprising against the Orwellian government, twelve districts must take part in a lottery where two children, one female, one male, between the ages of 12 and 18, are chosen to take part in a televised tournament. The rules of the games are simple, the kids must fight to the death until only one is left.
Seems pretty grim for a movie based on a novel targeted to teenagers.
The book, and, consequently, the film, shares many parallels with Orwell's 1984, authoritarian government imposing their will on the lower class all for the sake of control and rebellion being chief among them. But the film also plays as a comment to our society's fascination of reality television and exactly how far we're willing to let this go before we say, "This is just too much".
The sad fact is, I can see a lot of our culture in how the citizens of Panem seem to treat The Games. While I don't believe our society will ever dip so low as to let teenagers fight to the death for our entertainment, Jersey Shore has been on the air for five seasons.
The point is, The Hunger Games has been treated, it seems, critically, as our generations 1984, a work that very accurately held a mirror up to society and told the world where they were headed, for the most part.
However, for all the praise The Hunger Games is getting, American audiences seem largely ignorant to the work that clearly inspired it. A work written almost ten years before Suzanne Collins signed her three book deal with Scholastic. Published in 1999 and adapted into a film less than a year later, Battle Royale is the definitive piece of social commentary for our generation.
The similarities between The Hunger Games and Battle Royale are both fair and unfair, deep and largely superficial.
For the uninitiated, the plot for Battle Royale is going to sound incredibly similar to that of The Hunger Games. In an alternate-timeline Japan, a class of ninth graders are randomly chosen to take part in a battle to the death where only one can survive. The purpose of this competition is to insight fear in the growing and increasingly rebellious population so as the prospect of an organized coup of the totalitarian regime become next to impossible.
Sound familiar?
I'm not here to say that Suzanne Collins plagiarized her idea. I'm not writing this to bash The Hunger Games. For what it's worth, I feel The Hunger Games is one of the best science fiction movies released recently and do hold the film in fairly high regard. I am here, however, to say that Battle Royale, for all their similarities, does an infinitely better job than The Hunger Games at almost everything it tries to do.
A Real World Versus A Fake One
Battle Royale, as opposed to The Hunger Games, takes place in the real world. The Hunger Games weakens its own cause by taking place in a fictional world, slightly disconnecting the audience to that world's issues. Battle Royale takes place in Japan. And though that little detail may be more prevalent to Japanese audiences, the fact that, for those of us that are geographically inclined, can identify the land and its problems, we can better relate to its society and, by extension, its characters.
Killing Friends As Opposed To Killing Strangers
The Hunger Games further weakens its message by pitting twelve relative strangers against each other. The fact is, though it is slightly sociopathic, the thought of killing someone I don't know weighs far less heavier on my mind than the thought of killing someone I know and am possibly friends with. The "kill or be killed" mantra of The Hunger Games is far less of a psychological concern. Battle Royale, on the other hand, dares to ask the audience the question, "If faced with a choice, what would you do?" The students of the Battle Royale are faced with the same decision as the Tributes in The Hunger Games, but with the added weight that they happen to also know these people they're supposed to kill.
What would you do if you were standing face to face with your best friend and one of you had to die? Suicide is an option. Trying to work together to find a way of the battleground alive is another. Or you could just brutally beat one another until one of you dies. The options are very limited and Battle Royale doesn't shy away from any of them. We see these children make suicide pacts, jump off cliffs, hang themselves. We see two young girls pleading that everyone band together to find a way out, only to get repeatedly shot in the back by a student who doesn't share their sentiment. We see kids killing kids out of self defense and just out of sheer hatred.
The thought of friend killing friend just weighs heavier than the thought of strangers killing strangers.
Making The Audience Believe In Love
The Hunger Games has often been compared to Twilight, fans of the novel even going so far as to set up Team Peeta and Team Gale camps (I, personally, am in Team Josh Hutcherson). However, The Hunger Games lacks one thing in its delivery of the romantic storyline, authenticity. Yes, the romance was thrust onto Katniss for the sake of The Games, but her commitment to Peeta throughout the film, despite him being a petty, aloof douchebag, just never felt authentic. The romantic interest between the two lead characters in Battle Royale, on the other hand, is very apparent and sincere from the beginning. Shuya and Noriko almost never leave each other's side and when they do get separated, they are all the other can think about. "Is she safe?" "Is he alive?" It's real and it's emotional.
Though, when it really comes down to it, both Battle Royale and The Hunger Games do equally fantastic jobs at commenting on society. We have become largely numb to violence (how else do you explain giddy teens lined up at midnight to see a movie about kids killing kids?) and both films really do bring that to light, though in very different ways. The Hunger Games is more a satire on how we consume media, where Battle Royale shows us what the world has become or, rather, is becoming. Though I feel Battle Royale is the superior film, both deserve all of our attention. Like 1984, these movies might one day feel all too real.
