Beast of No Nation Review

Rating: 8/10 (15 March 2017)

The Netflix original movie, Beast of No Nation, directed by Cary Fukunaga is about a young boy, named Agu, that joins a militia group and gets brainwashed into killing people on his journey. During this film, children are being recruited to be child soldiers and are fighting for this Commandment and this rebel group. They don't really know why they are fighting and who, but they get orders from the capital. The movie starts by Agu and his family living peacefully, but then there is a warning that troops are attacking so the family splits and the father, brother, and grandfather stay. The family is captured and Agu watches as his family is slaughtered. He then joins a rebel group and takes revenge and brainwashed by this group. He does these terrible things and at the end the group surrendered to the UN and Agu lives in this missionary school. This film mostly focuses on revenge and brainwashing children to become these child slaves. The director of this film is Cary Fukunaga and he is an American director from California. Some of his other films and TV shows are True Dectective and Jane Eyre. this movie, Beast of No Nation was picked up by Netflix for a reported 12 million dollars and had an effort to make it into original films. He directed and wrote the script after working on it for 6 years. He then came across the Beast of No Nation novel and was inspired by the Sierra Leone Civil War. he wanted to translate what happened in the book and base the ideas into movie to people that never read it. The film is a historical fiction because it is not set in a real place and just says a western country in Africa. Some people might find that annoying because like the settings and why this is happening. The movie escalated quickly with the family enjoying life and then all a sudden is war torn and the kid family dying. The audience doesn't have time to recuperate what is happening and the movie keeps going. You never get the age of the kid or why there is a fight going on. During the film, the audience get to know that the group is the NDF and are getting orders by the capital. Then, it leaves the audience to guess if Agu joined the same men that killed his family because it never specified who those men that killed his family were. But, past those points the plot was amazing and the actors portrayed those characters well. They had the best of the best actors like Idris Elba, who played in Thor, Star Trek Beyond and The Jungle Book, and Abraham Attah, which was casted in the new Spiderman movie. These people made the audience feel like they were in the moment and felt the intensity. The action in the movie was suspenseful and horrific. The graphic scene with the machete captured the brutality of the moment and what was going on then. The director tried and he succeeded into making this movie as realistic as possible and gave the audience a brutal, but meaningful movie. The movie is not biased in any way because there weren't really a good guy versus bad guy. The audience couldn't really tell and that is what audiences are going to guess about since it it is in a unspecified war and country. The director goes on both sides when it comes to picking a side for the biased. He does capture Agu's side, but also deals with the NDF side and why they are killing. The director does a very good job trying to twist the story a little from the actual event. This movie was inspired by the book he read about the Sierra Leone War. If you look at the history of that there was a civil war and rebel groups just like the film. Also, in the film a lot of people died and in the true event over 50,000 people passed away. So the director does base this movie off that event and some may say that it is from that Civil War, but no one is for sure. It might be a mix of countries due to the geography or even their history of wars. Also, in the film they were mining gold and if you look at the history of the Sierra Leone War they were also mining for minerals and gold. That is why this film is called a historical fiction because of the events and the fictional characters. Therefore, overall this film did an amazing job capturing the events and the brutality Agu had to face and also the acting didn't disappoint. It made the audience feel the intensity of this war and the emotional roller-coaster of the hardships people faced in the country where they lived. I would give this movie a 8 out of 10.