Movie Details

Original Title
» Batoru rowaiaru

Alternate Title
» Battle Royale

Year
» 2000

Director
» Kinji Fukasaku

Cast
» Tatsuya Fujiwara, Aki Maeda, Taro Yamamoto, Chiaki Kuriyama, Sosuke Takaoka, Takashi Tsukamoto, Yukihiro Kotani, Eri Ishikawa, Sayaka Kamiya, Aki Inoue, Takayo Mimura, Yutaka Shimada, Ren Matsuzawa, Hirohito Honda, Ryou Nitta

IMDb
» http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0266308/

 Product Photos

 Video Review

 Discjunkie's Comments

Packaging / Design

Out of all the english friendly releases of Battle Royale, this is by far the best one in terms of packaging. Granted there are a few of other cool sets but if you want english subtitles this release is pretty much the best you can get.

With this said I'm not gonna name this the case of the year or anything. I mean let's be honest. Sure, it's an LE but it's not particularly luxurious. The discs are presented in a standard keepcase packaged in quite a delicate and easily dented tin.

The overall design is quite simple but still stylish. The tin is just typical silver-style (not chrome) with the logo printed in red on the front and a simple white sticker on the back listing the special features.

There's a small rating-logo on the front cover but this is just a sticker so you can easily remove it. Other goodies include a filmcell, booklet and some other flyer-stuff. So for short: quite a classic LE but by today standard I certainly think there should be something better on the horizon.

Disc contents / Extras

This is commonly considered as one of the best editions (extras wise) for Battle Royale if you're looking for an english friendly release. There's a massive making of documentary running around 50 min as well as several shorter featurettes.

Note however that there are several other collector's edition out on the market and from the looks of it extras are usually pretty different so a true fan might want to get several sets.

The film is presented in the 8 min longer director's cut version with an alternate ending. Audio is presented in Dolby Digital 5.1 and english subtitles are optional and easy to read.

All in all I think any fan of the film would want to pick this up. However, if you're not a big fan of special packaging I suggest you go for the re-released special edition (also from Tartan) as this adds better audio to the mix but still includes all the same special features.

Sidenotes

This set was only availble with the metal tin the first time around. It's now been re-released in an almost identical 2 disc edition presented in a standard keepcase with the collector's booklet and the map/chapter index. Most notably the audio on the re-release has been boosted to DTS 5.1 giving it a slight edge for that reason alone.