Battle Royale makes Hunger Games seem like a reasonable tea party. Battle Royale depicts such a chilling warped world that a country has passed a law that inexplicably and surprisingly chooses a class of students that have known each other since childhood and pit them to fight against each other. The reasons aren’t clear. Adults don’t trust children and have turned on them-a sadistic teacher’s dream of vengeance. The law seems to create an incentive for instilling the very traits that the adults’ fear in children: uncontrollable, violent madness. Battle Royale is brilliant because each character, regardless if they appear for only a few moments or the entire movie, are well-developed and fully realized as they confront the choice of how to react to this insane challenge: with love, hope, despair, distrust or insanity. One of the few times that I watched a movie and asked myself what would I do if faced with such a crazy situation. There are some brilliant, brief oneiric scenes that juxtapose the quixotic moments in daily life and the sudden horror of the teens’ situation. There are absurd moments that seem unrealistic in the stark realism of the movie-a tongue and cheek highlight of the absurdity of the situation, but it does not take you out of the movie, but further underscores that in such a warped world, such cartoonish moments are not a moment of relief, just further horror that the impact of violence has little to no impact at all. Battle Royale manages to send an impressive message without being preachy: if success in society means that you have to abandon love and hope and betray people that you’ve known and loved for a lifetime, then that is not success, but death.