War Porn

Rating: 4/10 (13 February 2016)

The problem with Beasts Of No Nation is a problem familiar with all depictions of Africa - the absence of any kind of context.
Things happen for no reason, allowing the viewer to fill in the blanks with previous propaganda, making the viewer believe that their previous misconceptions have now been confirmed.
Beasts Of No Nation was made by Cary Joji Fukunaga, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow. The Rockefellers own among the world's largest extractive industry corporations owners/founders - ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhilips, United Fruit/Chiquita, and many more. A similar family started Royal Dutch Shell, which exploits the people of Nigeria for their oil.
Which brings me to the decontextualization - this story is set 'in a fictional African country', however the writer of the book is a Nigerian national. If the Idris Alba character would have been working for someone, it would have been Shell, maybe Anglo-Ashanti Gold, or his direct superiors would have been working on their behalf.
This is lost in the war porn, as it always is. Because Beasts Of No Nation is just one in a long line of 'mood setting' rather than informative movies about Africa, all of which are funded by the same extractive industry corporations and the families that own them.
Blood Diamonds was made on behalf of the Kimberley Process, which tried to restrict diamond exports from Zimbabwe and the Congo DRC. It was driven by Nicky Oppenheimer of Anglo-American De Beers, the world's diamond monopolist in the 20th century, and even today the world's biggest diamond miner with 40% of global diamonds mined and traded.
The Interpreter, with Nicole Kidman, another movie 'set in a fictional African country', however clearly based on Zimbabwe, where De Beers covets the huge Chiadzwa and Marange diamond fields, which could supply 20% of the world's diamond supply and crash the world's diamond price. Mugabe And The White African is in a similar vein, trying to demonize the government of Zimbabwe, while extolling the virtues of Rhodesia.
Then of course there was the propaganda of Eve Ensler, trying to hyper-focus the destruction of Eastern DRC by the Rwandan government's M-23, into 'the Vagina Monologues'. Again, leaving the actual culprits out of the picture, and focusing on mercenaries/soldiers and war porn instead.
De Beers lost 117,000 hectares of land in the land redistribution of 2000, and they want it back. And if that means portraying Africans as psychotic 'Beasts Of No Nation', well that's what they've been doing for over 100 years.