Review of Beasts of No Nation (2015)
Seen in 2020.
Sun, why are you shining at this world?
Similar to The Thin Red Line (1998) but set in a fictional West African civil war, not in the Solomon Islands of WW2. Though shot in Ghana, using some Ghanaian vocabulary, adapting a 2005 novel by Nigerian-US author Uzodinma Iweala and referring openly to Nigerian peacekeeping forces, the setting is neither of those two African countries. It’s more similar to the two Liberian civil wars of the preceding decades and the 1991–2002 civil war in neighbouring Sierra Leone, but the serial numbers are filed off. For example, the Nigerians represent “ECOMOD”, apparently a fictional parallel to the real-world ECOMOG.
Region-level fictionalization was probably the wrong choice. It’s a tragic war film; it does not purport to carry a message about how to prevent or solve war, but still, the natural interpretation of fictionalization is that African wars are so unimportant that it doesn’t matter when or where they take place. On the other hand, making such a serious film on the subject, even through this layer of fantasy-like abstraction, simultaneously implies the opposite.
Like The Thin Red Line, the script does a good enough job bringing out the central features of war and raising them to artistic points. Here, as in Come and See (1985), the perspective is that of a child soldier, telling the miserable story of one particular child in a confident, linear fashion, without saviours, white or otherwise. One of the film’s major points is that the children realistically have no way to grasp the larger conflict around them, but historical concretion would not have hurt that artistic dimension of the production.
References here: First They Killed My Father (2017), Violet Evergarden (2018).