BEASTS OF NO NATION 25
were mixed but mostly positive. Bosley Crowther praised Battleground as “a smash-
ing pictorial re- creation of the way that this last [war was] for the dirty and fright-
ened foot- soldier who got caught in a filthy deal. Here is the unadorned image of
the misery, the agony, the grief and the still irrepressible humor and dauntless
mockery of the American GI” (Crowther, 1949). On the other hand, John McCarten
found the movie “constantly reiterating the idiosyncrasies of its characters,” a ten-
dency that rendered the film “pretty monotonous” in McCarten’s view, but he also
noted that “ there are plenty of rousing battle scenes” (McCarten, 1949).
Reel History Versus Real History
Although the film is a fictionalized and very narrowly focused version of the siege
of Bastogne, it is highly accurate with one major exception. There were no Ger-
mans disguised as American soldiers around Bastogne. Unternehmen Greif (Opera-
tion Griffin), as it was designated, only operated in front of the 6th SS Panzer Army
at the start of the German offensive, many miles to the north. Another minor but
deliberate inaccuracy: the 327th Glider Infantry Regiment did not have an Item
Com pany (glider regiments consisted of two battalions, with each battalion hav-
ing four companies, A- D and E- H). The film’s producers created a fictitious unit to
allow for artistic license and not have veterans object to inaccuracies.
Beasts of No Nation (2015)
Synopsis
Beasts of No Nation is an American war drama written, co- produced, and directed
by Cary Joji Fukunaga (who also acted as the film’s cinematographer). Based on
the 2005 novel of the same title by Uzodinma Iweala, the film— shot in Ghana
and starring Idris Elba, Abraham Attah, Ama K. Abebrese, Grace Nortey, David
Dontoh, and Opeyemi Fagbohungbe—is about a young boy who becomes a child
soldier in a genocidal war wracking his unnamed country in West Africa.
Background
While he was an undergraduate at UCal Santa Cruz in the late 1990s filmmaker
Cary Joji Fukunaga (True Detective) began studying the plight of child soldiers
involved in civil wars in Africa in an effort to develop a film script on the subject.
After six years of research, including a solo trip to Sierra Leone in 2003, Fukunaga
discovered Uzodinma Iweala’s novel, Beasts of No Nation (2005) and realized he had
found the story vehicle for which he had been searching. Focus Features optioned
the rights to Iweala’s book for Fukunaga in early 2006, and he wrote the first
draft of a screen adaptation toward the end of that year, using Joseph Campbell’s
12 Stages of The Hero’s Journey as his narrative template (an approach advocated in
a widely circulated development memo by Christopher Vogler, subsequently turned
into a book entitled The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure For Writers, 2007). Eight
years would pass before Fukunaga had the time and money to turn his script into
a film. Funding was put together from vari ous sources: Red Crown Productions,