Bill Coffin

It shall not end with a bang, but a whimper, so says T.S. Eliot. It is a notion curiously avoided by most post-apocalyptic film, which even when showing us a ruined, depopulated world somehow contrives to give us epic battles and huge explosions anyway. Carriers, a largely overlooked 2009 pandemic horror film manages to buck that trend, and in so doing produces a remarkably effective movie about the end of the world, one that focuses on the vast silence and loneliness that comes with the burden of survival.

Our story opens with a scene of four improbably attractive 20-somethings driving down an empty desert highway in a car they’ve obviously stolen and loaded up with salvage. Very quickly, the scene turns from casual jokes and sexual tension to one of intense dread as the protagonists encounter both the thing that can kill them, and the thing worth living for: another person.

Our world has been decimated by a vague pathogen of some kind that is highly communicable, very fast-moving, and completely fatal. There is no cure, aside from avoiding exposure, and that is the heart and soul of Carriers: the only way to survive a world that has been destroyed by disease is to stay away from infected people at all costs. But when infection itself is so easy to come by, survival itself becomes its own form of punishment. What does it matter to stay alive, if you must do so utterly alone and paranoid?

With that premise in mind, Carriers becomes a grim kind of road movie, with our heroes trying to get across the desert so that they might arrive at a vacation spot they remember as kids. The point being that the world might have ended, but if they can just make it to Turtle Beach, then maybe the world as they remember it might still be around, even if only a little. But the way is long and meeting other people is a certainty, and therein lies the danger. Nothing is as it ought to be in this world, and what should be a father and daughter, or a doctor at a clinic, or a team of scientists all turn out to be something quite different. And, in their own ways, deeply unsettling.

This little girl doesn't know it, but she's about to make a life-altering decision.

Carriers is an unusual movie in that it knows its source material intimately and follows its most logical conclusions, opting to portray what’s likely to happen in the scenario it portrays, rather than manufacture unlikely scenarios that fit neatly into typical Hollywood storytelling. In many ways, this is one of the most low-key horror movies you will ever watch. There aren’t many jump scares to be had (I cannot recall one, come to think of it), what little gore there is is presented in a natural and even predictable fashion. And the kinds of conflicts you expect to arrive in an end-of-the-world movie – predatory survivors in particular – come out in a refreshingly understated way. The world has ended, and with it all of the laws and comforts we take for granted. But it hasn’t turned the world into a guns-and-thunder war zone, either. What results is something more subtle, something much more quiet, and something infinitely horrifying. The shock here is not in creeps that jump out of the shadows, or maniacs with knives, but in the choices that must be made in order to survive. The characters who make it in this setting do so only because they can harden their hearts in ways that simply are not conceivable in a world that has not met the apocalypse. You just have to be willing to give this story some patience and let it sink in after the credits roll to get the full effect.

The doctor is in. This is not a good thing.

This might explain why Carriers is such an overlooked movie. I had not heard of it at all and discovered it only while looking for something to watch on Netflix streaming. The cover art showed what looked to be the cast of Dawson’s Creek trying to look tough, and were it not for the high rating the movie had, I would have passed it by, too. I hadn’t noticed initially that this stars Chris Pine and was made well before he appeared as James Kirk in J.J. Abrams’ reboot of Star Trek. He plays a bit of an impetuous jerk in this movie, too, though with more depth than what we find in Kirk. Here, he comes off as a character who, in regular times, might have just turned out to be another knuckleheaded frat boy. But he has been hardened by witnessing the destruction of the world, and he fiercely defends not only his right to survival, but that of his family members, also. A common theme of post-apocalypse stories is rebirth; who you are after the Fall. For some, it is a matter of redemption. For others, it is a descent into savagery. Pine shows us how one person can undergo both, and it is a character study we don’t often get in movies like this.

Sooner or later, everybody looks like this. Or will they?

Some critics have written off this movie as The Road Warrior without the car chases, and The Road without the love story. That’s a bit unfair, I think, for this explores an entirely different territory, the art of survival in a world so recently dead that the body is still warm. The reality of the apocalypse hasn’t quite sunken in to our characters yet, even though the immediate threat of death lurks around every corner. The things that motivate these characters seem to be suspended in the vain hope that maybe, somehow, things might return to normal. The horror of this movie isn’t that things have gone wrong. It is the mounting evidence that never again will they ever be right.

DYLMAG Rating: 7

Chew on This is Bill Coffin’s column on horror cinema.

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Chew on This is Bill Coffin’s column on horror cinema.

If you haven’t yet seen Battle Royale, you’re not alone. Despite this film’s cult status, its challenging subject matter made it the kind of movie that wasn’t even available on Region 1 DVDs, let along welcome for possible redevelopment by a Hollywood studio. For a while, you could only see this either off some Japanese bootleg or by watching it over the Internet. Now, thankfully, the movie is much more widely available, and there is even a remake in the works. Rarely do we see such a reversal of fortunes for a movie based on the tenor of its content alone, but once you watch Battle Royale, you will understand why. This is a great movie that is in turns disturbing, thrilling, horrifying, tragic and cynical. It is not a conventional horror movie by Western standards. There is no masked killer or monster or gimmicky reason for oversexed teens to perish in the post-coital afterglow. For many viewers, Battle Royale probably comes off as an action flick, or a political thriller, but to me, this is as horrifying as horror gets. As for the reasons why, I’ll get to that in a moment. But first, let’s provide a little context for what makes Battle Royale such a special film.

I have long been a fan of foreign cinema, not because I particularly enjoy weird artsy experimentation or because I get off on reading subtitles, but because foreign cinema is almost always crafted with a whole lot fewer resources than the average Hollywood film. Even straight to video American films tend to have really high production values compared to most movie-making in other countries. And while shoestring budgets and amateurish skills have led to some truly awful movies (Turkish Star Wars and a good portion of Bollywood action flicks immediately spring to mind), this resource scarcity often pushes talented and passionate film makers to make more with less, and this gives rise to a certain inventiveness and a willingness to take chances on content a more conservative industry might pass on.

Even more importantly, however, foreign movies offer exposure to artistic sensibilities that aren’t necessarily in line with what Western audiences (and U.S. audiences in particular) have come to expect. If there is one thing most American audiences can use more of, it’s exposure to how the rest of the world does things. And movies are no different. Along these lines, foreign cinema sometimes come with political views that are alien by Western standards, and this alone is worth sampling, and the stories they give rise to are even more so. So it is with Battle Royale.

After seeing one student knifed and another detonated, the kids begin to learn the art of silence.

The story of Battle Royale takes place in an authoritarian Japan of the near future. Nippon has become a cruel form of gerontocracy; the country isn’t just being run by old people, it’s being run by really cruel old people who are fearful of the revolutionary potential of the current generation of schoolchildren. To break them of this desire to overturn things, the government runs an annual competition whereby an entire grade of what would be 8th grade students in an American school are essentially abducted, taken to a remote locale and forced to battle each other to the death until only one student remains. The lone survivor comes back home to a media frenzy and one imagines some kind of reward, but you’re just not sure. The only image you’re seen of a previous winner shows a young girl so driven into psychosis by her victory that it doesn’t matter if she got a billion yen waiting for her when she gets home. Her life, such as it was before the competition, is over. And that’s just how the government likes it.

One year later: 8th grader Shuya, whose mother recently abandoned the family, and whose father recently committed suicide, is trying to enjoy the only thing he’s got left: the company of his friends as school. But despite this, Shuya is deeply disillusioned with life, as are his classmates, one of whom has become such a bad apple that he shanked a teacher named Kitano in the leg during school hours. Not long into the class trip, sleep gas is pumped into the bus and the kids all wake up on a remote island, the latest inductees into the infamous Battle Royale program. They are all marched at gunpoint into a crumbling bunker where they are met by none other than Kitano himself, who has recovered his wound and is not only too eager to take part in the government’s sadistic youth reduction protocol.

Somewhere, there is a school board that is thinking this guy has the right idea.

The rules of the game are simple enough: each kid is fitted with an explosive collar that will go off if tampered with, if Kitano remote detonates it, or if the wearer walks into a danger zone on the island, where merely crossing into forbidden territory radio-detonates the collar. The collars act as little GPS gadgets that let the soldiers running the program back at the bunker keep track of each student’s location. The collars also let the soldiers know when a student dies. If 24 hours pass without a single student dying, then all of the collars will detonate. Fight or die.

Each kid is given a pack with basic supplies and a random weapon. The randomness is meant to counteract any natural advantages some students might have over others, but when you see that one kids gets an Uzi and another gets a paper fan, you begin to realize that even if Battle Royale had been created as a form of political control, it has descended even further into just a sadistic exercise in screwing with relatively innocent kids.

The battleground is a small islands strewn with ruined buildings that look like abandoned post-war redevelopment efforts. Every six hours, a bunch of sectors are written off as danger zones, gradually giving the students less and less ground to hide in. Eventually, there will be no room left and even students with no will to fight will find themselves locked in mortal combat.

"My interests include listening to Ke$ha, organizing my Hello Kitty dolls and cutting Xs on top of my .357 ammo."

Right off the bat, we see that the students themselves have no interest in killing each other. They may be shiftless smartasses, but they are not murderers, and suddenly being thrust into that role is what, for me, propels this story right out of the realm of action and into that of horror. There is nothing fundamentally different to what’s going on in Battle Royale than what happens in, say, Saw. Or, for that matter, any other horror tale that rests on innocent people being forced to carry out deeds that are fundamentally repellent to them. Forcing people to do things contrary to their nature is one kind of cruelty. Forcing them to do things contrary to human nature is well beyond that. And for me, this is where Battle Royale hits home. It is the kind of horror that makes my skin crawl the most.

This was director Kinji Kukasaku’s point. At the tender age of 15, he was forced to work in a munitions factory during WWII, and he personally endured U.S. efforts to bomb him, his workplace and his entire country into oblivion. Somehow, he survived, but the experience left him deeply resentful of the adult leadership that seemed willing to sacrifice the nation’s youth on a battle it could not possibly win. He used this story to pour all of the venom in his heart into this one thing, and even though in interviews he waved the story off as a mere fable, the rage that fueled him as he made the film (itself adapted from Koushun Takami’s superior novel) is evident.

At this rate, the school yearbook will be about four pages long.

The action of the story, once it gets going, is frenetic, almost to a fault. You’ve got something like 40 students to kill off in less than an hour and a half, and the action in the film is more condensed than it is in the novel, which unfortunately relegates many of the characters to mere redshirt status. That they are all dressed in bland school uniforms that makes them difficult to tell apart only furthers this. Characters who are developed in the novel are given cursory appearances here, usually only long enough to kill them off. And as the students shoot, stab, strangle, taze, bludgeon and poison each other into oblivion, we are at last left with the only four who really matter: Shuya, our hero, Noriko, the girl he’s got a crush on, Kawada, a tough exchange student who survived a previous stint in Battle Royale, and Kiriyama a psychotic bastard who volunteered for BR so he could begin sharpening his already overdeveloped killer instinct. Shuya, Noriko and Kawada work together in defiance of the game’s need for there to be only one survivor. And, their teamwork succeeds where other students’ efforts to collectivize their efforts fail. All the while, Kiriyama roams the island like a black-clad force of nature, seemingly unkillable, unhindered by any sense of morality or restraint. Perhaps my favorite scene in the story is when two girls decide to stop fighting and shout out their decision to the whole island over a bullhorn. Kiriyama cuts them down with a burst of machinegun fire and then turns on the bullhorn so every student still playing the game can hear their classmates beg for mercy before he finishes them off. Kiriyama isn’t just a mutant for whom the game is uniquely suited. He is the kind of person the game will ultimately breed. On an infinite timeline, a society running Battle Royale will end up with nothing more than Kiriyamas. As the father of two, that scares the hell out of me.

"When I get off this island, I'm going to spend the summer at some camp in New Jersey."

In this, we see a grim circularity in this vision of Japan. The government uses its Battle Royale program to keep the youth so paranoid and terrified that they can’t possibly mount an organized resistance, but the disillusionment that results turns the kids into lawless sociopaths who end up making the government’s job that much easier. You can imagine that the government, by the time, our story begins, hardly needs any reason to justify Battle Royale: the country’s youth are so anarchistic and wild that perhaps a crash course in internecine warfare is just what these little punks need. It speaks to Japan as it really is: a culture steeped in its own history yet hurtling headlong into modernity, forever at odds with itself as a people both holding onto its history for dear life and jettisoning it in favor of the latest trend. Given the rapid graying of the country, one can sense through Battle Royale the ongoing tension borne from Japan’s very real challenge of figuring out how to care for its own elderly. If you think that the U.S. Social Security program has problems, it’s got nothing on Japan.

This conflict between young and old comes off as a central conflict in Battle Royale, but to me, it extrapolates into something larger; the kind of institutionalized cruelty that happens whenever any government decides to put its own needs before those it is supposed to serve. The very notion of government serving its constituents rather than the other way around is indeed a fragile one, especially for those of us born into a post-WWII planet. Prior to WWII, there were a grand total of seven working democracies on the planet. After WWII, democracy was the default form of government for the human race. It only took about ten years to make that switch. It’s not so crazy to think that one day, things might switch back somehow. I say this not as a jab at any particular U.S. administration, but at the frailty of government itself, and of the spectre of human tyranny, which lurks behind the facade of every well-intentioned effort to rule. Even the most noble of governments can become a form of hideous villainy. When our own children are made to die for the sport of those who see more value in them dead than alive, then we’ll know that we’ve gone past our own expiration date as a society. The Japan of Battle Royale cannot last. The Shuyas, Norikos and Kawadas have their own ways of resisting and bringing things down. But they should never even need to. And yet, how many places can we find children pressed into warfare, brutalized to make a statement to other adults, and made to toil for the fortunes of their adult masters. The places are everywhere. We just choose not to look for them. And that may be the greatest horror of all.

If only Marksmanship, Survival and Torture Methodology were available for college credit.

DYLMAG Rating: 9

There are folks out there bound to disagree with me on this, but I just love this movie. It’s chilling and grim, but there is something compelling about it, especially in its later stages that I keep coming back to. If the sight of watching junior high students off each other makes you uncomfortable, then plan to be uncomfortable. But don’t skip this one.

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