#4 — battle royale ii

Now drinking the Korbel used to top off the Hangman’s Noose.

I’ve watched a little bit of Battle Royale II and, based on the fifteen minutes I’ve seen so far, let’s just say that it’s not as interesting or as eye-popping as the first one. If anything, it seems to be more of a confused retread. The kids who slaughtered each other on the island have now, get this, declared war on adults. And somehow it all ties into terrorism. In fact, there’s now a faction group of “BR supporters” which numbers ten million — a political bloc that seems to think that kids killing each other on an island is a fabulous idea. (And you thought the United States was a scary place.) Inexplicably, the game has spread to Japan and now one can personally enroll in the program through the Internet. (Gee, that’s an extremely stupid idea given that you have a 1 in 40 chance of staying alive.)

It’s safe to say that this plot makes no sense. First off, let’s do the math. 365/3 days of killing = 121 survivors per year. Since we saw in the first film that there is some downtime between classes killing each other, this would suggest to me that the number falls far shorter of this 121 survivor rate. Let’s put it at 50 survivors.

So in Battle Royale II, it’s three years after the first film, which would give us around 150 survivors. Since the Japanese government controls these massacres, it seems to me that they would be quite capable of either corralling the surivors or taking them out. If they have the resources to kidnap schoolbuses and send them to an island, then certainly they will be able to control 150 vicious loose cannons.

Further, if there have been 150 survivors, that would mean that there have been 5,850 deaths of children. Even if these kids were vicious, why would anyone advocate that much death? Now we’re talking a figure of “10 million BR supporters.” Now Japan has a population of 127 million. Which would suggest that 8% of its population thought highly enough of rampant childhood homicide to campaign for it.

Either Japan, as presented in the Battle Royale films, is a very fucked up place or there is something seriously wrong with the story logic.

More importantly, the fact that Beat Takeshi is nowhere to be found on this film sucks ass.

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