“We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?”
― William Golding, Lord of the Flies
Luckily the battle cry vociferation from Jason Lapeyre’s pre-pubescent-Platoon I DECLARE WAR, is: not damn much went wrong, and yet if they were adults, it all would have been very very wrong.
You see, I DECLARE WAR is like nothing you’ve ever seen before, and yet is 100% made up of everything you’ve seen before. Take every classic war movie you’ve ever seen, put the ranks back in middle school and throw about the fanastical whimsy of a Beano and you’re two thirds of the way there. This is BLACK HAWK DOWN by way of STAND BY ME.
On surface level, I DECLARE WAR is effectively 90 minutes of battle re-enactment: A hot summer’s day skirmish of capture-the-flag between a group of middle school kids. A very well shot, acted, edited and scripted juvenile blitzkrieg of log-bazookas and red-paint-water balloon grenades, which actually manages to evoke a remarkable amount of tension & audience investment considering it’s under-16 ensemble cast are essentially play fighting. Said tension is in part due to the frequent stylistic infringement of the kids’ fantasies over the actual ‘play fight’ reality: a water balloon suddenly is a C4 loaded grenade, a Supersoaker is firing with muzzle flares & a dissonance of gun shots. These intrusions of real-world combat constantly blur the lines of what the audience is watching: is this still a battle of capture the flag? Do one of these kids have an actual gun? Is this going to turn Columbine?
Because quick witted scripted quips aside, this is no game to the characters- particularly team leaders PK (Gage Munroe) & Skinner (Michael Friend)- but rather an actual call to arms to save Private Ryan. In these 13 year olds minds, that flag is everything, blood may be shed. It is this handle of seriousness that means I DECLARE WAR never veers into pastiche. The film dolls out every archetype seen in every war film since PATTON: torture, honour, love, sacrifice, betrayal, abdication, revenge etc etc, yet it never does so with a wink-wink-nudge-nudge self awareness that would ruin the tone and effective tension of the movie. As in the opening Golding quote, These kids do everything that adults have done for decades of war cinema, yet manage to evade being derivative or formulaic because of in part the fresh faced slew of child actors & mostly the knifes edge balance between fantasy & reality, BB Guns & bowie knives. The playful satirising of war-film tropes & disturbing question of wait-did-she-actually-just-shoot-him-with-an-arrow keeps the audience constantly on edge.
Cliche as it may be, this review could have by-lined with pretty much any quote from Lord Of The Flies, but the allusions between Golding’s 1999 classic novel & Lapeyre’s feature film are too rife for the reference to not be made front & centre. Both contain a band of youths re-enacting the very atrocities of war, starting out as a juvenile game and ending in a varying amounts of bloodshed. And while I DECLARE WAR remains much lighter hearted and fleet footed than Flies- never ploughing the annals of actual mortal brutality- its social commentary on violence in today’s youth is still effervescently above subtext. In handling these themes of desensitisation of violence in youths in such a matter of fact & playful way, I DECLARE WAR is much more successful in its portrayal than more extremist accounts of juvenile violence such as ELEPHANT & WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN. One can enjoy the film, fist bump the sky & grin from ear to ear, and yet still consider the acts of seriousness and aggression behind these children’s eyes. It really is masterful scripting.
Juggling the script with naturalness and keen delivery is a stellar ensemble cast of fresh faced newbies that we are likely to see proliferating our screens in the years to come if this performance is anything to go by. They remarkably capture the characters that flooded our classrooms growing up: the headstrong leader, the loyal follower, the wannabe popular douchebag, the layabout joker, the lovestruck do-anything; and play each of their roles with relatable accuracy and youthful innocence. Someone Ouija board River Pheonix and tell him he’s got competition.
On the lens aside of things, the entire film could in the wrong hands have looked like a YouTube Fanvid, yet the picture is blissfully crystal, the steadicam fluid & fervent & the depth of field pin-point. Cinematographer Ray Dumas used every inch of that Red One to capture the permanently forested surroundings as proficiently as possible. The film looks smashing.
I DECLARE WAR is lean & mean, yet charming & clever; a 1080p high definition Polaroid snapshot of both the cruel & fun nature of growing up. Full Metal Jackets now comes in kid sizes.
8 laser eyeballs /10 smashed hornet nests
And that’s my two cents.
MyTwoCentsFilm 