The Hunger Games vs Battle Royale: A Fight to the Death

A poor excuse for a picture of Jennifer Lawrence 

So I told you I'd start using this blog for other things. Well here we go. This is probably going to be the first of two blog posts I do tonight. I haven't quite decided if I'm going to do the other one because it's a lot more personal but we'll see...

Anyway, you may or may not be aware that a film version of The Hunger Games came out a little while ago based on the book by Suzanne Collins. It was something I was utterly unaware of until I joined a website called Goodreads.com and the one person I was was friends with on there at the time had it in her "to read" list. Once the film came out a month or so later I started seeing people comparing it to another, Japanese film called Battle Royale its self based on a book of the same name by Koushun Takami. Apparently there has been a bit of controversy with people saying that The Hunger Games is based on or even copied off Battle Royale. So I decided to do a bit of research and watched both films and read both books.

So What's The Idea

At their core both stories are about a group of teenagers forced to fight to their deaths in some kind of arena with a variety of different weapons for a mixture of political and entertainment reasons. HG is set in a post-apocalyptic USA where a dictatorial, technologically superior Capital rules over 12 "Districts" and every year 24 teenagers are chosen to take part in the Hunger Games from the Districts. The idea being that somehow this helps to keep the Districts in line and also provides some over-the-top reality TV for the citizens of the Capital. 

BR on the other hand is set (contrary to popular opinion) in an alternative present Japan. Most commentators seem to say that it is a near-future possible Japan and the film does kind of give that impression but the book gives you an idea of time and level of technology. It's definitely a present day Japan but one where a fascist government is in power and has been since the 40's, perhaps in a world where the Pacific part of World War 2 didn't happen. 

For reasons that aren't really properly explained in either the book or the film a class of teenagers is selected from a school each year, taken to an island somewhere, given a selection of random weapons and are forced to kill each other. In the film it is is suggested this is somehow supposed to control a youth culture that has got out of control although it isn't explained how this works as the kids seem completely surprised when they are selected and surely to have any effect something like this would have to be advertised? In the book it is explained as somehow sowing the seeds of distrust through the population thus discouraging organisation and rebellion. I found neither of these explanations satisfying. Let's face it the concept is preposterous in both stories. You really just have to take it at face value that these kids are in this situation and see how they react.

The Books

Both books are slightly strange to read. HG is written for that quite modern phenomenon the Young Adult (or YA) audience and is thus quite simply written with quite a small vocabulary but there are some strange quirks to the style - sentences where the odd word just seems to be missing or where she has used what you might consider the "wrong" word. And also there are strange asides to the reader (Katniss Everdeen the heroine is also the narrator) that seem to come out of nowhere and kind of spoil the flow of the story. 

BR meanwhile has obviously been translated from the original Japanese. Unfortunately this has been done by an English speaking Japanese person. Really, in a perfect world you should always only translate into your own language because no matter how good you are at speaking another language you will never quite get the nuances and subtle differences in word meaning that a native speaker can and this really shows up in this translation. Don't get me wrong, this guy speaks much better English than I speak Japanese but it makes the narrative a bit jerky and word usage is a bit repetitive. 

Time for another picture. Guess which one this is from.

One of the complaints I've seen in reviews of both the book and film of HG is how graphic the violence is. Well I'm here to say it isn't. In either. People who say it is must be very sensitive souls who think the world is full of fluffy bunnies and cuddly bears. If anything it seemed rather sanitised to me considering the subject matter. The people who make this complaint also seem to have a very superficial insight into the story as well. The author has written an entertaining, if slightly shocking, book about the effects of violence on children that also makes the reader question how they would react in a similar situation. Think about how you might have reacted if you had been caught up in the Bosnian war. How would you have reacted aged 15? Would you have killed someone just because they were a Serb/Croat/Muslim even though you had been in the same class as them at school a few weeks ago? She is using a ludicrous plot device to make young people think about quite a serious subject. I don't know how well it woks because I have seen very little evidence of  any of the target audience thinking that deeply about it but if I can see it then other people must too surely...

BR on the other hand is very graphic, both in the film and book although it is almost cartoonish (anime-ish?) in its graphicness. It's hard to compare but I get the feeling that in the original Japanese it was probably better written than HG and probably had much more subtlety to it. I have no idea if Takami had the same idea as Collins did but again the book does make you think about how you would react given a similar situation.

So Do I Think One is Based on the Other?

First of all Collins has stated that she didn't even know BR existed until someone pointed it out to her after she had written HG. I am in fact inclined to believe her. Although the premise of both stories is very similar and undeniably there are a lot of similarities (love story between the two surviving contestants/victims, people forming groups to survive, one or two monstrous kids who  seem to be killing machines, regular announcements of  death tolls) the two stories just feel different. BR is undoubtedly the better book looking at it from a literary point of view while HG is more of a holiday read. I'm glad I watched both films and again again BR is probably the better film artistically but which would I get out on DVD from Blockbuster? Probably HG. It's more fun. And it has Katniss in it.

An even poorer excuse for a picture of Jennifer Lawrence. That's Katniss?!?!