Kami-sama no iutoori

Review: As the Gods Will (Takashi Miike, 2014)

The teen death game genre has been used for social commentary as seen in Battle Royale (and in The Hunger Games or so I have been told) but what else can be said with this set up, where teenagers are forced to fight for their lives by being contestants in arbitrary game situations. Maybe it can be used to reflect teenage ennui/mundanity and make a teenage audience appreciate the mundane. Or perhaps it can be one more in a long line of pure teen fantasy where an individual, despite their boring lives, is found to be the messiah. There is some of both of these things at times in As the Gods Will but its real focus is on the death games, and thankfully as its other moments are not as intellectually evocative as it is viscerally so; unlike his Over Your Dead Body which accomplishes both.

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