Beasts of No Nation (2015)
Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga
Based on the experiences of Agu, a child fighting in the civil war of a West African country. Follows Agu's journey as he's forced to join a group of soldiers. While he fears his commander and many of the men around him, his fledgling childhood has been brutally shattered by the war raging through his country, and he is at first torn between conflicting revulsion and fascination.
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3 films that influenced Beasts of No Nation
What critics say influenced Beasts of No Nation
Closer in spirit to Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men than Elem Klimov's Come and See , which deployed a more subjective use of image and sound to convey the brutality of war on a boy's psyche, Beasts of No Nation is one maximalist, long-take-dependent display of violence after another.
The Africa-set drama is a relentlessly violent, vibrant, and electric film that is at once as druggy and entrancing as Coppola’s 1979 cut of Apocalypse Now and as sonically inventive as Elem Klimov’s Come and See.
It's more wise about how something like this should look, in other words, than how it should feel, and the epiphany one has while watching it isn't that this kind of thing happens in the world all the time, across centuries and continents, but that Beasts of No Nation looks a lot like Come and See before it looks a lot like The Thin Red Line before, finally, it looks a lot like Apocalypse Now.
And while it’s very of-the-moment to apply the descriptor of ‘horror film’ to anything sporting a notably sinister undercurrent (from Mulholland Drive to There Will Be Blood), the debasing effect of war is a real-world horror so elemental and so perpetually now that an unspoken exception must be made for the expressionistic likes of Full Metal Jacket, Come and See and, by association, a lesser but still worthy film like Beasts of No Nation.
At first, the scene recalls the ruthless killings by the child gangs in 2002's "City of God ," but unlike that scenario, these boys aren't murdering for power or acclaim.
You might have seen the Leonardo DiCaprio vehicle “Blood Diamond” or a number of other films that subtextually deal with children drafted into guerrilla warfare in Sierra Leone or Liberia, but “Beasts of No Nation” is different because it focuses on one child’s unique experience.
Films centering on the myriad conflicts of the African continent are nothing new, with stories like Blood Diamond, Hotel Rwanda, and Black Hawk Down becoming modern classics in recent years.
Pero hay que decir también que Beasts of No Nation no merece una comparación con el sentimentalismo de Hotel Ruanda (Hotel Rwanda, 2004) o Diamante de sangre (Blood Diamond, 2006).