"Beasts of No Nation" was a much better film than I was expecting although not particularly groundbreaking. I didn't know going in that it was the second feature film directed by Cary Fukugawa, whose "Jayne Eyre" (2011), with Mia Wasikowska and Fassbender, I liked a lot. It's photographed beautifully if conventionally. As with all child soldier war films, a lush and happy pre-war childhood is used as a counterpoint to the sickening brutality of the later conflict. However, like a lot of current cinema, TV and music (e.g. Mr. Robot, Star Wars Episode VII), it's also at least in part shamelessly and unapologetically derivative.

I'm referring to the sequence in which Agu and the rest of his militia take "gun juice" - some kind of unnamed hallucinogenic drug - and sack a village. It's one of the most important parts of the film, and it's colorized to deliberately bring to mind Richard Mosse's classic Kodak Aerochrome infrared film documentary on the Congolese civil war, "The Enclave," and his still work across a variety of African conflicts using the same technique. It's unfortunate and dishonest of Fukugawa to not acknowledge the extent to which the central, violent sequence of his film is derived from Mosse's work. Presumably he's waiting for Mosse to file a copyright lawsuit before disgorging any credit, much as Drake did with James Turrell's after jacking his light installations in his Hotline Bling video. I really liked this film, but this lazy copying we're seeing across the arts has got to stop. This is probably the most visually memorable part of the film and it's straight up ripped off.

That aside, there is great work here. Attah's performance is one of the best ever by a child actor and Elba is brilliant as always. There are great supporting turns here too, by Francis Weddey as Agu's older brother and by Emmanuel Nii Adom Quaye as Strika, to name a couple. It deserves consideration among the best child soldier films I've seen. I'd like to revisit a few of them here to put "Beasts" in its proper context: Die Brucke ("The Bridge," West Germany, 1959), Ivanovo Detstvo ("Ivan's Childhood," USSR, 1962) and Idi i Smotri ("Come and See," USSR, 1985).

The Bridge, directed by Bernhard Wicki, probably best known for directing the German sequences in "The Longest Day," is very good. The biggest flaw here is that the necessary establishing work of showing the pre-war lives of the characters goes on far too long in this film.

Die Brucke (1959)

A good hour is spent reminding us that the characters are children via much not terribly well-acted domestic melodrama before the battle is joined. Once it is, it's very well filmed. It's also the most similar to "Beasts of No Nation" thematically because the battle the boys find themselves in is as completely pointless as their cause is unjust.

Contrast this with the two Soviet films featuring child soldiers during the Second World War, "Ivan's Childhood" and "Come and See." In these films, the children have no choice but to fight; their enemy, the Nazis, is so pitiless and inhuman that their only other option is death. As such we don't get any rumination on the morality of the boys' casus belli. However, as "Ivan's Childhood" is helmed by one of the greatest filmmakers of all time in Tarkovsky and "Come and See" by a very good one in Klimov, we also don't get simplistic jingoism.

Ivan's Childhood (1962)

Tarkovsky's genius is evident from the first moments of "Ivan's Childhood," which find Ivan dreaming of the happy days before the War, floating through the treetops of his bucolic country home, while he's actually hiding from the Germans in an abandoned building. Child soldier war films need this kind of establishing sequence, but Tarkovsky's is the most skilled and probably the shortest. He doesn't overdo it; he tells it in these dream-like flashbacks that really have the visual power of beautiful memories because, as you would expect from Tarkovsky, the film is shot with staggering power. There are shots in this film that made me gasp, they were so astoundingly gorgeous. The film does become unnecessarily sentimental in the end which cuts into its overall impact, but as a work of original visual photographic and cinematic genius, this is the best film on this list.

Elem Klimov's final film, "Come and See," hits the hardest of all of these movies. It's said to have inspired Spielberg's "Schindler's List," but Spielberg is too much of a wimp to be this brutal for almost 2 and a half hours. Klimov pulled then 15 year old Alexei Kravchenko out of school to play the lead - something only a Soviet director could do - and put him through such an emotional and physical wringer that he was physically transformed by the experience from an apple-cheeked kid to an androgynous, hollow-eyed wraith.

Before

After

In one scene, Klimov had live machine gun rounds fired just a few feet over this kid's head. An entire forest was dynamited around him. His hair turned grey in real life. The brutality of the German onslaught in Belorus is depicted in unflinching horror, a truly shocking miasma of violence, torture and death that even left me feeling wrung out. Klimov himself, and many others who had actually lived through the events, said that he had to water it down because if he'd shown it as it actually had been, no one would have been able to watch it. "Come and See" is Klimov's epic mic drop. He never made another film, and he didn't have to.