1. Regarding the drama conflict:
The biggest drama conflict in the plot of Battle Royale is the trade-off between survival and morality. To survive, you must give up morality and be a bad guy. No one deserves to die, but if you want to live, everyone must die. The setting of this plot is very attractive just like that! Battle Royale is the ultimate. Everyone is a classmate. Well, friendship, buddies, girlfriends, and love are all tested for survival. When shooting, they are desperate to highlight this core conflict. There are color traps and lovers. (It’s been a long time, the specific plot is a bit unrememberable), all audiences have a strong sense of substitution when they watch it, to drive the audience to re-examine their social relationships.
The Hunger Games is over, and it will be divided into two factions when it comes directly. A good person is a good person right away. Either you don’t kill, or if you want to kill, it’s a bad person. From the beginning to the death, a little justice and evil do not touch your body; even if a bad person kills, there is no infighting. He single-mindedly chases and kills a good person and then gets killed by a good person. Fleeing, not even Twilight, at least there are racial conflicts between wolves, people, and vampires. It's a waste of your life-and-death plot design, so you can just survive the game directly.
2. About background settings:
The background setting of this kind of game is impossible under any circumstances, it can only be a humanity laboratory in people's imagination. Battle Royale is very clever, and it's done in one stroke, directly speaking in the core plot conflict. Don't think about the audience, anyway, let's do a brain exercise together and experience human nature. The Hunger Games had to spend a full hour on this inexplicable issue, and the more and more it became clear. You know, no matter how you explain it, you can't find a human society that can design this kind of game to achieve any social purpose (whether it is to shock young people in Battle Royale or shock the low-level people in The Hunger Games). Moreover, the heavy-handed description of the future social pattern in The Hunger Games at least did not form any shock to me (except for clothing, which will be discussed below), compared to the Fifth Element, The Matrix, Starship Team, Blade Runner and even Hong Kong. In the dark future film, this social background is neither convincing to make people believe that it is true, nor can it make people think about how it would become like this. In the end, there is an impression that the core conflict is not strong, and the background explanation is difficult to justify.
3. About the details:
Battle Royale has designed many excellent details that fully serve the theme. In addition to the classmates mentioned above, there are also such as the limited time and distance collar, which directly solves a large number of game rules problems. This is the Hunger Games. Inside, the master control program has to be changed to achieve the same effect, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. The weapons of Battle Royale are machine-selected, which can be machine guns or pot covers, implying that everything is a fair destiny. The main highlight of The Hunger Games is the clothing. The selected low-level people’s clothing, including furniture and hair styles, are completely copied from the Second World War. It seems to imply that the most tragic stage of human society is at that time, so the selection is like a concentration camp. The people are like the Jews at the time. When it comes to the city, it completely enters the extreme future social form, neutralized and now looks super fashionable and exaggerated image and clothing, but when the game player takes the stage, it is completely restored to modern clothing. It seems that I want to say that it is historical human beings who are suffering, the future human beings who enjoy pleasure, but now human beings are fighting life and death, and they are on the line.
To sum it up briefly, in fact, it might be wrong to compare The Hunger Games with Battle Royale. Battle Royale is a humanity laboratory, and the Hunger Games itself is a live computer game. The director originally didn't want the audience to think about the heavy human nature paradox like Battle Royale, but just wanted to show everyone how the reality show goes to extreme conditions. What stands out is not the conflict between the characters in the game, but the conflict between the participants and the audience in the reality show. This aspect is also the strength of the United States, and the films with similar themes have been much better. It makes no sense to compare Battle Royale.
Finally, I think that mainstream commercial films in the United States actually have an invisible SARFT, which is doing ethical and political reviews. In China, your morally and politically wrong films will be killed. In the United States, it may result in a disastrous box office and public opinion defeat, or damage to the director’s reputation. Therefore, in such a film, the protagonist must be justice, and justice will eventually defeat evil, otherwise the audience will say: "Seriously deviate from common sense in life, and the image of the characters is too gray. There is no such place in the land of the United States."
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