10 Most Ambitious War Films Ever Made

Beasts of No Nation, written and directed by Cary Fukunaga, and based on the 2005 novel of the same name, follows the story of a West African child soldier. The story is purposely vague in detail about the conflict and setting in which it takes place. Fukunaga instead focuses on the genuine horrors of the life of child soldiers.

To this end, Fukunaga cast local African children in his film. Fukunaga also spent six years researching the Sierra Leone Civil War and seven years developing the film's script. Before filming, the director contracted Malaria, which Fukunaga credited for allowing him time to polish his screenplay. When principal photography began, Fukunaga acted as a cinematographer when his director of photography dropped out of the project.

Part of the issues for the crew was that they shot in locations with nearly no infrastructure. Fukunaga said of the filming:

"Everyone was working sick. Everyone was working on three or four hours of sleep, and after a 35-day shoot, it felt like we¹d shot for 100 days."

The ambition behind this film is less in the scope of the production, and more about the weight of the story it tells. The director has said that he was not trying to telegraph any moral with his film. If you need a movie to teach you that the use of child soldiers is terrible, well, then you're probably too far gone.

Fukunaga's real mission was to give the audience a sense of what it's like to be recruited as a child soldier. He wanted to show how it was for children thrown into a perilous war where you have no power and no sense of meaning. This is why the audience is never told anything about the conflict, or where the story takes place. It doesn't matter. Fukunaga wants you to have a little sense of the confusion and terror that his protagonist endures.