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Fukunaga, who’s emerged as the MVP of True Detective’s first season after departing before its disastrous second, sketches out this precarious stability with affectionate efficiency, then rips it all away in a few sickening scenes that send Agu running by himself into the forest, his family members all dead or gone. He wanders into the clutches of some rebel forces, where the Commandant (Idris Elba), swaggering out of the foliage bare-chested but in a military beret, deigns not to kill the boy but to add him to his ragtag army, promising him a chance at revenge against the people he saw slaughter his father.
It’s never very clear just who Agu ends up fighting, but he fights and he kills, surrendering to the new role in which he’s been placed with an anguished inevitability. Beasts of No Nation develops a hallucinatory edge as its hero learns to hack someone to death with a machete, as he befriends another boy, Strika, who doesn’t speak, and as he partakes in the drugs the soldiers all use before heading into battle. At one point, everything melts into tones of red, as if so the blood won’t show. At another, he and Strika laugh like the kids they still are while in the background one of their compatriots executes someone. Agu’s brainwashing isn’t an erasure of who he was so much as a complete replacement of the normalcy he previously knew — he’s just trying to keep up with this terrible surrogate family.
Elba has always had an unreal charisma that the movie puts to decidedly warped use — his Commandant is monstrous but magnetic, a cult leader, abuser, and father figure, the head of a fucked up band of lost boys addled on war and cocaine. He is savior and destroyer for his followers, a man with no name and no history, standing unruffled, mid-assault, while bullets dust the ground at his feet. With his long takes and hazily beautiful landscapes, Fukunaga gives the film a visual grandeur that makes it feel like it’s taking place after the world has ended, and all that’s left for Agu is this morass of endless, uncaring violence.
Note:As of today there is no perfect version available of this movie. Some have excellent picture quality, but they have Hardcoded portuguese (I think) subs. This version has lesser quality, but the hardcoded subs are in English.
http://nitroflare.com/view/AE8C5090CEEC81E/Beasts.of.No.Nation.2015.WEBRip.720p.VO.NNM-Club.mkv
Language(s):English
Subtitles:English, Russian
