Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #37: Battle Royale (2000).

In the close future, Japan has become a disaster zone. Unemployment is soaring, and a generation of teens are totally out of control. Thus, the government has legalised the Millennium Education Reform Act, aka the Battle Royale program, as a last desperate attempt at disciplining them. Each year, a school class chosen at random are transported to a deserted island where they must square off in a brutal survival game over three days. Each player starts with food, water and a random weapon (some far more effective than others), and they're all under the eye of a strict former teacher (Japanese cult movie king Takeshi Kitano). There is apparently no escape, and if multiple players survive, everybody dies thanks to the IED neck braces they've been made to wear.

Quentin Tarantino has called 2000's Battle Royale his favourite film since 1992. It's unmistakably obvious why, and while I don't love it quite that much, it still rocks my socks immensely. Besides the clear action/science fiction quotient (which is indeed relentless), it provides rich characters and character dynamics through flashbacks that teeter on soap opera-style sentiment without being jarring or cloying. It also has a very funny satirical angle about media exploitation (the game is shown on live Japanese TV) and how the press and politicians, in trying to curb juvenile delinquency, usually take the wrong action through being oblivious to its causes.

Despite Battle Royale's being an adaptation of Koushun Takami's manga and novel, director Kinji Fukasaku drew his inspiration for it from his own adolescence. Born in 1930, at age 15 Fukasaku and his class were forced to work in a munitions factory. When it was hit with artillery fire they were trapped inside and had to use each other for shelter. The survivors were then tasked with disposing of their friends' corpses (this was at the end of World War II, after all). This harrowing ordeal gave him a deep-seated hatred and distrust of adults, a sentiment which courses through the whole movie (particularly in the journey of the lead male, Shuya Nanahara (Tatsuya Fujiwara)). It was also his last before he died of prostate cancer in 2002, but what a swansong for him. Let's just hope no real government has to ever enact a Battle Royale program.