Name: Battle Royale: The Best Teen Movie
Uploaded: 2026-03-08T17:19:58.000Z
Duration: 7 min 47 s
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Everybody loves a good teen movie, and the genre has a lot of competition.

You've got John Hughes classics like the Breakfast club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

90s teen rom coms like 10 Things I Hate about you and she's all that.

Richard Linklater's coming of age comedy Dazed and Confused or like the Fault in Our Stars and Love Simon.

You could even throw all eight Harry Potter movies into the mix.

But when I search ranker.com, which everybody knows is the authority on ranking stuff, I'm disappointed to find that my favorite teen movie doesn't even crack the top 100.

Of course I'm talking about Kenji Fukasaku's turn of the millennium masterpiece, Battle Roya.

The premise of Battle Royale is really simple.

In a dystopian Japan, a classroom of teenagers is chosen every year and shipped to an island where they have to fight to the death until only one is left standing.

You might recognize this premise from the Hunger Games books, the first of which came out eight years after Battle Royale and nine years after the book by Kasho and Takami on which it's based.

This concept is also the basis for the hugely popular video game Battle Royale and its predecessor, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, which was at least in part inspired by Fukasaku's movie.

Unlike the Hunger Games, Battle Royale is remarkably contained.

There is no larger world, no political intrigue, plotline.

The audience is just dumped into this horrific situation with the characters, and

we experience its shocks as they do, and they are shocks.

It's definitely a violent movie, but it's the execution of violence that makes Battle Royale so great, and

this should come as no surprise, though I didn't know this when I first saw the movie at summer camp, age 16.

Battle Royale is the final film of Japanese auteur Kinji Fukasaku.

He made this incredibly vigorous film about teenagers at age 70, which is amazing.

But by then, Fukasaku was a master, a criminally underappreciated master of Japanese and world cinema.

He made his mark on the industry in the 1970s with a breathtaking series of films about Japanese gangsters, the Yakuza, in the chaos after World War II.

Unlike the more traditional yakuza films, Fukasaku's movies have a wild, manic energy to them.

The camerawork is designed to throw you into the action.

It's a thrilling, disorienting experience to watch them, and

Fukasaku's message in Those films comes through loud and clear.

In a society decimated by war, friendship, camaraderie, even the famous codes of honor of the yakuza only stretched so far.

And if someone could get an advantage by betraying his friend, he was more likely to do it than not.

In Fukasaku's films, the honorable ones are often the first to be killed.

In Battle Royale, the same philosophy holds.

In the chaos of the game, the speed at which friends turn to enemies can give you whiplash.

And the violence, like the violence of the yakuza films, is sudden and devastating.

As a viewer, it's like you're one of the students.

It all comes so fast at the beginning that you just want to pause and get a grip on things.

The ones who trust too liberally are the ones who get killed first.

It may seem like Battle Royale is a fable of nihilism, with mindless, brutal killing doled out to anyone and everyone, but

the violence in Fukasaku's vision has a purpose.

Like all great teen movies, Battle Royale is really about friendship.

Fukasaku's interested in what friendship really means when the gloves are off in the most barbaric circumstances.

What does human connection mean in the context of humanity's capacity for unspeakable violence?

At that time, unspeakable violence was very much alive in the memory of the older generation in Japan.

It tested them in ways that the younger generation couldn't begin to understand.

This is what life was like for Fukasaku himself when he was 15, the same age as the students in the film.

In the movie, it's almost as if the older generation, represented by the teacher, devises the game as a way to communicate their experiences with the youth.

And it's almost as if Fukasaku made the film for the same reason.

Battle Royale is interested in the kind of friendship that can't be explored at high school, its friendship tainted by a deeply cruel world.

But it's all the more poignant when it persists in spite of that fact.

Fukasaku's last movie is a lot of things.

It's blackly comical, it's scary, it's a naked look at humanity, and

it's a gripping piece of balls to the wall entertainment, directed by a man with a lifetime of skill and experience.

It's a teen movie, and it deserves to be considered with the very best of that Gen.

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