I watched Battle Royale a couple of days before leaving Manila. While it's been days, I'm still thinking about how I feel about the movie. It's not easy to dismiss as good or bad: the gore factor is tremendously high -- almost ridiculously so, and surely zeroing in on this would make me miss out on the relevant underpinnings.

Still, whoever packaged the movie doesn't want you to look deeper. After all, the movie's tagline is "Could You Kill Your Best Friend?" The answer is a bonecrushing, bullet-ricocheting, fleshcutting, agonizing yes. The movie kills roughly 30 prep students, who are made to go at each other on a deserted island in order to survive. And just when you think that it would take the students a while to get around to doing their business, someone is walking around with an arrow through her neck. Pretty soon someone gets a hatchet on the forehead. A throat is sliced with a scythe. Several students hang themselves.

This straightforwardness is, in fact, the reason why I remain ambivalent about the movie. Sure, there are poignant sub-contexts; I immediately felt like it was a cross between The Lord of the Flies and Reality TV (which makes it simply kitsch) but at the end of it, it's more like the Breakfast Club Redux with lots of actors who don't fall to the ground with one bullet. The preparatory video the kids watched (sort of like a How to Kill Manual) summed up the dark humor throughout the movie. Indeed, I felt like watching a Dungeons and Dragons deathmatch (here's a +2 Crossbow!) unfold.

And there's no point asking who will live. The movie starts with the one previous Battle Royale Winner. It doesn't matter if only one survives, plenty will die violently in the process. And that's what we're watching here. The point of the movie is not just about survival, it's avoiding a vicious demise.

So, the truth is is that it's hard to see through the crimson lens what director Kinji Fukasaku is trying to do. Is he merely creating a cheap bloody thriller or a two-hour statement of his own post-apocalyptic view (now that there is no more real threat of an apocalypse)? A race, it seems, will continue to kill it's own, and in dramatic and entertaining fashion. Each one of those prep kids are like Stephen King's Running Man -- an unwarranted death sentence meted out by people you would like to trust the most: parents, teachers and, in the Running Man's case, Richard Dawson.

Nevertheless, it was worth seeing, if only for that one sequence where (spoilers here) several girls holed up in a lighthouse end up shooting each other ala Reservoir Dogs. Like the Tarantino movie, the scene emphasizes the fragile trust that exists among the friends-turned-enemies where a single suspicion is stamped out with a rain of bullets. Evil always rears its ugly head.

I liked it, I know, but to what do I owe the liking to? Is it the gore? Is it that psycob*tch with a scythe? Or that punk that wouldn't die? Or that teacher that wouldn't die? Or the weapons (and the coolest weapons of them all, the enemy detector)? Or is it the movie's vision of a frail, gruesome and self-destructive society filled with armed wackos?

Maybe the sequel will shed light on the matter.