Over the holidays, mythical girlfriend got me a copy of the Battle Royale novel. Like most instances, I’ve heard time and time again about how the book was better, and since I was a huge fan of the BR film that was released in 2000, I was curious to see how the book stacked up against a film that I’d seen numerous times over.
I recently finished the book, and I’m having a difficult time in determining which was the superior, or if it’s even possible to compare. Due to my familiarity with the film, I had a general mental picture of all the players of the game, which kind of led to ease in reading story where the imagination is already filled in for most of it, leading to where I’m basically reading words.
I guess the book was a little bit better, in the idea that they simply fleshed out and gave just about every student a modicum of spotlight to display a little bit of depth and character, before they were inevitably killed off, and there were some things that the book had that were omitted from the movie, or altered for ease of filming. Frankly, I understand why the film did what they did in some of these cases, and in comparison to the book, there are some blatant scenarios where particular characters were used or displayed, solely for the fact that they had actor obligations to grant screen time, or something along those lines.
But it was a fun adventure revisiting a familiar property, but finding all the differences between book and film. I do think that if a few particular events that happened in the book happened in the film, it would have led to some interesting execution on screen, but this is where I think some things were omitted, solely due to budget or difficulty of filming and/or post-production.
Most importantly, I thought the end of the film was really rushed and weak, and this is made more prevalent by how much more in-depth and thorough the book portrays it. The book’s explanation of the ending was actually coherent, and not so much like something was missed in translation compared to the film.
But if there was absolutely one thing missing in the book, that made the movie particularly iconic for me, was frankly one of the best lines in cinema translation. When I didn’t see the words “you’re the coolest girl in the world” in the book when Hiroki was seeing Chigusa off, all I could do was Peyton Manning face.
