The Long Download

Sometime in the early 2000s I sat in front of my modem and waited the entire day for Battle Royale to finish downloading. The connection was slow, the file enormous. I didn’t move.

The premise is close to perfect in its simplicity: a class of Japanese schoolchildren wakes up on a deserted island and is told the rules—the last one alive in three days goes home. Kinji Fukasaku’s film doesn’t belabor this. It drops you in and lets the horror accumulate. Quentin Tarantino has called it his favorite film ever made, which is the most on-brand possible endorsement, but he’s not wrong.

I spent years afterward half-obsessed with it. Noriko Nakagawa, Mitsuko Souma, Kazuo Kiriyama—these characters stayed with me the way only a handful of films manage. What makes Battle Royale stick where pure horror doesn’t is that it’s filtered through the mundane brutality of school social hierarchies—who sits with whom, who’s been quietly cruel to whom for years—before any actual killing starts. The Hunger Games borrowed the skeleton of the premise and made something considerably tamer with it.

Seventeen years after it was made, it finally got an uncut theatrical run. Some films take their time finding their audience. This one had its audience waiting the whole time—waiting by the modem, as it turned out.