The Best Teen Movie Has a Kill Count

In 2002, internet time was still metered by the minute and a download could run for two days straight. The only film I ever thought was worth that—the bill, the occupied line, the entire ridiculous commitment—was Battle Royale. I’d caught a blood-soaked trailer somewhere online and couldn’t let it go.

The premise is brutal and simple: a Japanese school class gets dropped on a deserted island and told to kill each other until one person remains. That survivor goes home. Everyone else is just dead. What makes Battle Royale more than a premise, though, is what it does with the people inside it—the moment when everyone who loved each other has to decide whether that still matters when the only alternative is dying.

YouTuber Nerdwriter has an essay on why Battle Royale is the greatest teen movie ever made, and his argument goes further than the body count. He tracks the exact point where psychology breaks—where logical decisions start overriding emotional ones, where people begin fighting the social conditioning that had kept them human. And underneath all of it: first love. The kind that’s so large and so new that it might be the only thing worth protecting when everything else has already gone to hell.

He’s right. I knew it the first time I watched it, on a scratchy downloaded file that took most of a weekend to arrive.