A must-see Netflix Original

Rating: 9/10 (26 August 2018)

Beasts of No Nation is an essential film to see: the first Netflix Original ever produced is also a very good film about modern african warfare, and the ultimate film about children soldiers.
Beasts is a very hard pill to swallow. It isn't particularly gory (The Last King of Scotland, for example, is way harder to watch in terms of gore), but much of the violence that can be seen is utterly crude, especially because it is often performed by brainwashed children. It is definitely a very hard R, mainly due to its theme.
Nonetheless, Beast doesn't focus much on battle scenes. There are a few, but not very long or massive, mostly guerrilla-style battles. The focus is on the development of the main character, Agu, rather than on action scenes of sort.
I assume the role of Agu wasn't a particularly hard one, but the child-actor playing the character gave him much gravitas, especially in some of the final scenes. Idris Elba also performed with intensity as the Comandant of the Battalion.
I loved Season one of True Detective, and Fukunaga again orchestrated wonderfully quite a set of single-take scenes here aswell (though not as long as the famous one from the tv show). Photography sometimes brought eccellent imagery to look at.
While the final 15 minutes or so didn't completely feel conclusive, I would say that, as of the date of this review (August 2018), Beasts is perhaps the best Netflix Original film so far released. The only other film that might compete for the title is Hell or High Water.
Following this first release, there have been very few outstanding Netflix films (to list some good ones: Hell or High Water, Mudbound, Annihilation, The Meyerowitz Stories) and tons of very bad releases (Spectral, Death Note, Mute, The Cloverfield Paradox and so on). Let's hope that the 2018 fall season brings many such good Netflix Original films as Beasts of no Nation.