Battle Royale Limited Edition [4K Ultra-HD] [Blu-ray]

Product Information

The difference between the two is whether you want to own Battle Royale in 4K or Blu-ray, as Battle Royale II: Requiem is Blu-ray only regardless of what version you choose. Based upon the book by Koushun Takami, the story has been adapted to manga, western comics, and the big screen. The 4K discs are all region, and while the Blu-ray discs are region restricted to Blu-ray players set to B. Overseeing the carnage is ‘Beat’ Takeshi Kitano (Sonatine, Hana-bi, Zatoichi) as the teacher pushed to the edge by his unruly charges.

The real highlight, however, is the gorgeous rendering of composer Masamichi Amano’s orchestral score. Fukasaku fully expected to die himself until the war suddenly ended, leaving him adrift with the rest of his generation.It is better than the DVD release, although the aspect ratio does suggest that there has been some degree of cropping (or open matte). There’s not a lot between the two versions, and I feel like the Special Edition was a smidge softer. Playing like a turbo-charged hybrid of Lord of the Flies and The Most Dangerous Game, the final completed work by veteran yakuza film director Kinji Fukasaku ( Battles without Honor and Humanity, Graveyard of Honor) helped launch a new wave of appreciation for Asian cinema in the 21st century. And Bloody Education (on Disc One) and Bloody Graduation (on Disc Three) are brand new interviews with Kenta Fukasaku looking back at both his father’s work on these films as well as his own.

You were a member of an exclusive club if you’d watched Battle Royale, the very idea of school-children pitted against each other in a battle to the death as entertainment had this punk sensibility about it. As a teenage boy in 1945, he was drafted by the Japanese military along with his classmates and made to work in a weapons plant.

His work—which has had a strong influence on the likes of John Woo and Quentin Tarantino—includes The Green Slime (1968), the yakuza film series Battles Without Honor in Humanity (1973-76), and Message from Space (1978).

everything we’d been taught in school, about how Japan was fighting the war to win world peace, was a pack of lies.

There are also a number of behind the scenes features for both movies, showing how the films were made, and the impact that they had. Close-ups and brightly lit scenes reveal more precise details than earlier Blu-rays managed, and even the muted colour palette has a little more life to it. The film is an adaptation of Koushun Takami’s 1999 novel of the same name, with the film’s screenplay written by Kenta Fukasaku, music composed by Masamichi Amano, and distributed by Toei Company. I laugh every time when he claps along with the chipper TV instructor as she tells the students how best to knock each other off. I try not to watch the same film twice in the same year, and put the new set at the bottom of the to-watch pile.