BEASTS OF NO NATION

Beasts of No Nation

Grade: A-

**Currently on Netflix**

Featuring Abraham Attah as Agu, Idris Elba as The Commandant, Emmanuel Nil Adom Quaye as Strika, Kobina Amissah-Sam as Agu’s Father, Francis Weddey as Agu’s Big Brother, and Jude Akuwudike as the Supreme Commander

Premise: A West African boy is torn from his loving family by civil war and ends up a child soldier in the rebel militia

This Film was Not Rated (NR): Contains strong, bloody violence, language, intense, disturbing images including depictions of rape and torture, sexual references, and some drug material

Beasts of No Nation, the first original film produced by and for Netflix, the online streaming service, is a haunting, engrossing film that takes a sobering look at one of the great tragedies the world has to offer, namely, the way young African boys are manipulated and turned into soldiers by blood-thirsty, power-hungry men who need bodies to fight for them in their endless conflicts. Adapted--from a book of the same name by Nigerian-American Uzodinma Iweala--for the screen, directed, and filmed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, who won an Emmy for his work on TV’s True Detective, Beasts is a frank but beautiful tour through this dark, painful reality.

Plot

In an unnamed African nation, young Agu (Abraham Attah) knows there’s a war going on in his country, but it ultimately affects him little as he plays with his friends, pranks his older brother (Francis Weddey), and listens to and learns from his father (Kobina Amissah-Sam). He has a mother, too, and a younger brother and sister, but the family is split up when word comes that the war between the government troops and the rebels is coming closer. When it does come, the war takes the lives of Agu’s father and brother and seemingly everyone left, with Agu surviving only by fleeing into the jungle, where starvation and sickness loom. But he’s rescued—if you want to call it that—by armed members of the Native Defense Force (NDF), a rebel battalion made up largely of child soldiers. First beaten and mocked and threatened, Agu is spared when the battalion Commandant (Idris Elba) takes a liking to him. In the battalion, Agu finds camaraderie and purpose, experiences alcohol and drugs for the first time, and survives initiation, which involves killing a man to prove his toughness. Though he grows to love some of his comrades in arms and experiences the thrill of victory in war, Agu can never quite digest the horror of the things he sees and does, and he wonders if God can forgive him.

What Works?

Before this project, Fukunaga was best known for directing part of the first season of HBO’s anthology drama True Detective—particularly the part with a five-minute tracking shot of Matthew McConaughey’s character navigating his way through a ghetto crawling with armed gang members. If that somehow didn’t convince anyone that Fukunaga knows what he’s doing with the camera, Beasts unquestionably will. Despite some very harrowing and disturbing content, Beasts is one of the most vividly, beautifully-filmed movies I have seen in some time, so rich and immersive it’s an incredible sensory experience. The colors pop, point-of-view shots put you in the shoes of the characters, sudden explosions and gunshots make you flinch, and the blood and mud are unavoidably real. Maybe Fukunaga is just an artist with the camera, or he knew the film would have to be especially vivid if it was going to be viewed almost entirely on screens at home, or both, but Beasts is visually-dazzling.

Fukunaga supposedly spent seven years writing the screenplay, but with the camerawork so fine, you hardly need the limited dialogue to begin prying into what you’re seeing. While the notion of child soldiers has haunted people for decades, Beasts asks us to consider that though the influence of substances, physical intimidation, and “brainwashing” may well play a part in the boys’ transition into soldiers, who’s to say part of it isn’t the boys’ desire to belong, to have purpose, to potentially get revenge on those who have scarred them, or even to just feel something again after being numbed by grief and tragedy? It’s not hard to understand why Agu so quickly agrees to join the NDF when they find him, after he’s starving, lonely, sickly and orphaned, and is given the chance to have friends at his side and a gun in his hands. And, while the horror and grief of his first kill is driven home—you wish he wouldn’t do it even though you know he will—later scenes feed you the adrenaline of battle so that you’re almost eager for the action to start. If you, as the viewer, are eager for the action to start, how about boys who are not only taught to fight and to make their own destinies, but who are simmering with grief and rage and need an outlet? I’m obviously not saying killing is right, for any reason, but this film dares to peel the onion a little bit. And the quiet, thought-provoking closing makes you wonder if there’s any coming back from this, if there is a real future for boys who undergo this trauma.

This is Fukunaga’s movie more than it is any of his actors’, but the cast, most of them unknowns, are uniformly fine. As Agu, young Attah’s role isn’t quite as showy as, say, little Quveznhane Wallis’ was in 2012’s Beasts of the Southern Wild, but it’s a brave, sturdy performance and Attah proves a very effective audience surrogate. In a wordless role as Agu’s unspeaking best friend in the troop, Emmanuel Nil Adom Quaye has some nice moments. And Elba shows multiple sides of the Commandant, a man who is intimidating, empowering, strong, inspiring, and yet petty and flawed as well.

What Doesn’t Work?

Fukunaga was really, really close to having a masterpiece on his hands—with such a vivid, clear, thought-provoking picture consisting of uniformly-brilliant visuals—but the screenplay doesn’t quite deliver. A two-hour, seventeen-minute film, Beasts is naturally more Life-Of-A-Child-Soldier than specific story, but it seems to more or less run out of plot just shy of the two hour mark. The camerawork and acting is good all the way through, and it’s not exactly hard to decipher what’s going on, and the ending will definitely leave you pondering, but the film is so adept at setting up Agu and his loving family, his desolation after their deaths and his need to belong to something—even the NDF—and many of his experiences in the NDF, that it’s noticeable when the film starts running out of gas. Part of it is the character of the Commandant, a role some have whispered could bring Elba year-end awards attention; he’s prone to giving long-winded, substance-infused speeches, but that’s it--the character doesn’t really go anywhere, and the big climactic confrontation between the Commandant and some of his frustrated troops seems like a screenplay necessity more than a dramatic change in the emotional tide. It’s like the movie inhaled deeply in the happy opening scenes, held its breath through all the trauma of the middle chapters, then hurriedly exhaled all at once so that the last 15 or so minutes were a blur.

Content

Beasts isn’t quite as dark and graphic as it could have been, but this is such a heavy, tense film that it’s gratifying that it isn’t. Nevertheless, this film would definitely earn an R rating on a traditional scale (it was Not Rated because it was made for Netflix), with bloody violence (some of it shot in graphic close-up), plenty of F-words, substance abuse, and disturbing hints at traumas like child molestation, torture, and rape. This movie isn’t for the faint-hearted, and it can very likely induce emotional reactions. Plus, with its visual-heavy structure and heavily-accented dialogue, it’s not the most accessible film.

Bottom Line

Beasts of No Nation tells the harrowing story of an African boy’s plight from happy family member to lonely orphan to accepted member of a gang of violent, trained child soldiers. Thus, it tells the story of thousands of boys—attempting to put a clearer, even more human face on one of the great human tragedies of our day. Shot with vivid intimacy by Cary Joji Fukunaga’s prying, intelligent, weightless camera, the film is gorgeous to look at and experience even when the content is ugly, and, despite a screenplay that gets a little weak late in the going, it’s a thought-provoking, emotionally-powerful experience.

Beasts of No Nation (2015)

Written for the Screen and Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga

Based on the novel by Uzodinma Iweala

Not Rated (a Netflix Original Film)

Length: 137 minutes