Beasts of No Nation

Based on the same-titled novel by Uzodinma Iweala, a Nigerian doctor and sociologist who began the story as a thesis project at Harvard, the movie immediately puts us in the shoes (and sometimes bare feet) of its hero, eight year old Agu (Abraham Attah). He narrates parts of the movie in a mostly embittered but occasionally lyrical voice-over, telling us about his mother and father and siblings and the peaceful life they once enjoyed.

Then the country is turned upside-down by revolution. Agu's family belongs to a particular group that ousted the people who are now trying to take over the country (or as they might put it, take the country back). "You can feel the ground washing away beneath your feet," he tells us. Soon the village is in chaos, soldiers are clomping down the street shooting rifles at strangers, bodies are everywhere, and Agu is running through the jungle alone. Then he comes upon some armed and dangerous boys about his age or slightly older, their hats and torsos bedecked with camouflaging vegetation (a very "Lord of the Flies" image, pushed maybe a bit too hard) and then we're into the main story, which finds Agu being protected and trained by a man known only as The Commandant (Idris Elba). 

The Commandant is magnetic and foul, hilarious and frightening, hateful and tender. He's an unholy combination of a battlefield commander, a drill sergeant, a football coach, a decadent older brother, and the patriarch that a lot of these boys either never had or recently lost to revolution (or revolutions, plural—we get the sense that governments flip over all the time here). The boys adore The Commandant because they think he's teaching them to be men, specifically warrior-men, but he's really teaching them to be murderers, thieves, rapists and torturers who wrap their bloodlust and greed in ideology that seems half-understood when it's comprehensible at all. 

The smartest thing about "Beasts" is the link it draws between the Commandant's soul-sucking brand of motivational therapy and the grinning swagger of soldiers who invade Agu's village near the start of the film and terrorize Agu and his relatives along with other captured citizens. They spout slogans, but it's clear that the slogans are less a justification for horrific violence than a pretext that gives them permission to do what they might have done anyway, in their imaginations, or on dark stretches of road in whatever part of the country they originally hailed from. They're people who either became criminals after putting on uniforms or always were criminals. Many soldiers throughout history have essentially been criminals in uniforms; Americans in particular seem to hate admitting even the possibility that this could be true, but it is true, and it has always been true, and Agu's story is one more exploration of the phenomenon.