Many of the other reviewers seem to have missed what I thought was the point of this provocative and mesmerizing film.
First, let me say that the cinematography in this film is striking. And I think that is part of the point: the world is beautiful, and sometimes dangerous and cruel--but not as dangerous and cruel as people can be.
The film begins with hardly any exposition, and one has to pay attention to discern the relationships between the characters. The first time we see Juilanne Nicholson's character, Doctora, it is not immediately apparent that she is a prisoner. And even when that becomes clear, there is still a lot of ambiguity built into the film by the choices the director makes. For example, there is a scene early in the film in which Doctora is coerced into helping to beat on one of her captors--and we then find out it is his sixteenth birthday, and the beating is a more intense version of a birthday spanking.
Nicholson's character arc is the B plot of this film. The A plot is the shifting relationships among/between her captors--a group of child warriors who are left to themselves at a remote outpost in a ruined bunker. We are not told where the story is happening, exactly (although it is clearly in Latin America someplace), or when, or what cause the characters are fighting for. They are under the command of The Messenger, whose dwarfish stature is probably not an accident of casting. The kids themselves all have nicknames, including Rambo and Smurf; suggesting, perhaps, the long shadow cast by American culture. But the overall lack of specificity lends to the film a timeless quality, one that implies we could be looking at any war, anyplace, and the outcomes would be much the same.
There are echoes of Apocalypse Now and Lord of the Flies, as the behavior of the kids becomes more erractic and savage as they leave their mountain bunker for a trek through the jungle. Interpersonal bonds begin to break down due to the stress. The violence (and life itself) ultimately comes to seem petty, arbitrary, and degrading to the human spirit, which I think is the point of the film. At one point, one of the younger child soldiers articulates her dream of dancing on television, and she may as well be speaking about another galaxy. And it becomes clear that she needs love, and can't get it.
People who are confused by the end of the film must not know that the fascist dictator General Pinochet had many left-leaning dissidents thrown out of helicopters (or that the sentiment "Pinochet Wasn't Wrong" with a helicopter graphic turned up on t-shirts worn by neo-fascists in Portland, Oregon, earlier this year). The predicament of the last character the film shows may not simply be individual, but may be emblematic of the whole of Latin America itself.
The purposefully disorienting effects of the film are intended, I think, to encourage the audience to empathize with the characters in the film. I mean, I hated high school, but at least I wasn't conscripted to fight a war in the jungle or got robbed of a normal childhood. I also wasn't put in a cage for fleeing the kind of violence depicted in this film; a little empathy on the part of the USA might be called for.
The film has a lot of powerful visual images, and the predicaments of the characters are going to stick with me. I count that as the result of successful filmmaking.
First, let me say that the cinematography in this film is striking. And I think that is part of the point: the world is beautiful, and sometimes dangerous and cruel--but not as dangerous and cruel as people can be.
The film begins with hardly any exposition, and one has to pay attention to discern the relationships between the characters. The first time we see Juilanne Nicholson's character, Doctora, it is not immediately apparent that she is a prisoner. And even when that becomes clear, there is still a lot of ambiguity built into the film by the choices the director makes. For example, there is a scene early in the film in which Doctora is coerced into helping to beat on one of her captors--and we then find out it is his sixteenth birthday, and the beating is a more intense version of a birthday spanking.
Nicholson's character arc is the B plot of this film. The A plot is the shifting relationships among/between her captors--a group of child warriors who are left to themselves at a remote outpost in a ruined bunker. We are not told where the story is happening, exactly (although it is clearly in Latin America someplace), or when, or what cause the characters are fighting for. They are under the command of The Messenger, whose dwarfish stature is probably not an accident of casting. The kids themselves all have nicknames, including Rambo and Smurf; suggesting, perhaps, the long shadow cast by American culture. But the overall lack of specificity lends to the film a timeless quality, one that implies we could be looking at any war, anyplace, and the outcomes would be much the same.
There are echoes of Apocalypse Now and Lord of the Flies, as the behavior of the kids becomes more erractic and savage as they leave their mountain bunker for a trek through the jungle. Interpersonal bonds begin to break down due to the stress. The violence (and life itself) ultimately comes to seem petty, arbitrary, and degrading to the human spirit, which I think is the point of the film. At one point, one of the younger child soldiers articulates her dream of dancing on television, and she may as well be speaking about another galaxy. And it becomes clear that she needs love, and can't get it.
People who are confused by the end of the film must not know that the fascist dictator General Pinochet had many left-leaning dissidents thrown out of helicopters (or that the sentiment "Pinochet Wasn't Wrong" with a helicopter graphic turned up on t-shirts worn by neo-fascists in Portland, Oregon, earlier this year). The predicament of the last character the film shows may not simply be individual, but may be emblematic of the whole of Latin America itself.
The purposefully disorienting effects of the film are intended, I think, to encourage the audience to empathize with the characters in the film. I mean, I hated high school, but at least I wasn't conscripted to fight a war in the jungle or got robbed of a normal childhood. I also wasn't put in a cage for fleeing the kind of violence depicted in this film; a little empathy on the part of the USA might be called for.
The film has a lot of powerful visual images, and the predicaments of the characters are going to stick with me. I count that as the result of successful filmmaking.