Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Beasts of No Nation is a harrowing tale of the adversity found within the darkest of human hearts. It is a story of struggle, of perseverance, of pain, and of suffering. There are no victors within the confines of Fukunaga’s script—there are only survivors. In short, it is the perfect film to introduce the world to Netflix’s filmmaking division, as it contains the precise combination of elements to lionize the video-streaming service as a major player in the film production world.
Make no mistake: failing to consider Beasts of No Nation as an event film is a grave injustice, in spite of its subject matter. The film is directed and written by an incredibly talented and highly-regarded filmmaker, it stars an actor of high regard in a physically and emotionally demanding role, and it touches on a subject that is both notorious and highly subversive. From a purely analytical perspective, Beasts of No Nation is a film that falls under the “Oscar-bait” category and is the kind of film any studio would dream of producing, simply because the film’s success would guarantee an unprecedented level of celebrity. Therefore, the film, for Netflix, is a gamble because its failure would suggest that the service is not quite ready to play in the same sandbox as the other, more mature studios.
What then of Beasts of No Nation as a film? It is harrowing, painful, often difficult to watch, and, ultimately, a character study in the minds of the children forced into combat to suit the whims of the petulant adults who are startlingly even less suited for military action. At the same time, the film is emotionless and lacking in a quality that produces resonant affect within its audience. To call it dull is to be unfair, as the film is never boring. Instead, the film’s portrayal of war and child soldiers comes to the same conclusion as the famous Edwin Starr song: war is good for absolutely nothing. For a film about child soldiers in Africa, this conclusion is not unexpected.
The story begins in a small village in an unnamed country in the African continent. We are introduced to our protagonist, Agu, trying to sell the frame of his family’s television to a group of soldiers. Expectation—and no small amount of cultural conditioning—suggests that Agu is poor and that his actions are the result of economic hardship. Fukunaga’s script, however, spends much of the film’s early moments subverting audience expectations. Agu is not poor—certainly not any more so than the rest of his village. His parents are not uneducated. His older brother is not a starry-eyed radical dreaming of revolution. Instead, Agu is merely bored, his parents simply normal, and his older brother just another horny teenager.
Fukunaga establishes a lush normalcy amidst the setting’s climate of conflict, and his script and directing suggest an appreciation for the simple fact that war is a constantly meandering event that—save for the frontlines—is typically only mildly felt by normal citizens. Agu’s circumstances inevitably fall apart, and it is the introduction of Idris Elba’s Commandant that sets the stage for Agu’s propulsion into the nameless conflict of his nameless country. The circumstances of Beasts of No Nation’s war are murky at best—Fukunaga wisely chooses to reveal bits and pieces of the conflict through bits of information delivered over radio, and through the rehearsed barking of rebel soldiers.
That we don’t understand the nature of the conflict and that we are never asked to empathize with any side of the battle is a strength of Fukunaga’s film. Through Agu, played by newcomer Abraham Attah, we see a conflict starring nameless players working towards a nameless goal. Indeed, Agu’s presence in the conflict is that of a partial observer. He is asked to do terrible things, but his involvement extends to little more than that of an audience surrogate. We see through his eyes and we feel his emptiness. Fukunaga’s script is emotionless and affectless precisely because war is an emotionless construct. Beneath the money, without the nationalism, ignoring the hatred, war is two children throwing stones against one another—a fact that the film revels in highlighting.
At first, I strongly considered awarding this film an infamous “No Rating” score. However, doing so would suggest a level of social importance that Beasts of No Nation does not quite achieve. Instead, it is merely a powerful film about an important issue, directed by a talented artist, distributed by a company clearly aching to secure a position in a wealthy industry. When the day comes that the movie about Netflix is made, one hopes that Cary Joji Fukunaga will be asked to direct and write the film. The irony would be palpable.