I just finished reading the manga and boy was it an awesomе ride or what? I think this even beats 20 Century Boys and is now my favourite manga. Not only the story is brilliant but the art is realistical and beautiful, just how I like it. And the character development is just stellar, made me really feel for so many characters. I never get to cry because of books or movies but when certain Battle Royale characters died I really wanted to be able to cry for them...
I haven't watched the movie, nor do I intend to, I see no way to have even a quarter fo the depth of the manga. But I'd love to read the book some day and see how it differs fro mthe manga.
Spoiler for the whole manga, read at your own risk!:
Where do I start? So many memorable scenes, so much sadness and gore and yet so much beauty and bravery? I really, really liked Takako, too bad she was eliminated early on. And the whole lighthouse arc really hit me hard, it was a great example how easy things can go so very wrong in such a deadly environment.
I think one the big problems of the manga is that Kiriyama is just too superhuman. I can somehow buy him being exceptionally gifted and being able to learn and do just about everything but jumping like a kangaroo with a bulletproof vest was a bit too much, don't these things weigh tens of kilograms? He was too much like a horror movie monster, survived agaisnt the odds way too many times.
The other major problem is that Shuuya was too damn idealistic and deserved to die quite a lot of times. I actually would have liked an ending without the final twist - in other words and ending in which Shogo wins by killing Shuuya and Noriko in cold blood. Call me a cruel bastard but I really wanted to slap Sugi and Shuuya many times for their reluctance to kill even people who were stark raving mad, had killed many of their friends and to top it off were attacking to kill them too. I wish Shogo had picked other people to save.
Don't get me wrong, these things frustrated me a lot mostly because the rest of the manga was so absolutely amazing. It kind of made me want to kill all the bastards who were watching The Program, not only those who organised it.