City of God Review
“If you run away they get you, if you stay they get you too”-Rocket
Better than anything else in the movie, that line embodies the sad prospects the children in the City of God face. They either get caught by the police for commiting crimes, or caught by the other hoods selling drugs in a bloody drug war.
Something that amazes me about this movie is how young the gangsters are. One of the maids at the Miami Motel says, “you should be studying or working, you don’t even look like hoodlums.” She is so right. It’s sad that these kids fall into this at such a young age ( like in Slumdog Millionaire) , and then can’t escape a life of crime.
Like Shaggy’s girlfriend says, “Hoods don’t stop. They take a break.” They may try to escape the cycle, but there’s always room for relapse. Shaggy tries to start a new life, but before he can, his past comes back to haunt him, and he’ shot to death by the police.
The same thing happens to Lil’ Dice. It scares me that he was so young when the raided the motel, and that he shot all those people without a care in the world. He’s a poster child for why we have limits on how old you need to be to buy a gun. At that age, our brains haven’t fully developed our decision making center, so we don’t weigh the consequences of our actions very much. You could argue adults don’t either, especially in this movie.
But at what point do we consider these characters adults? Even though he turns eighteen, Lil’Dice is no adult in City of God. He kills impulsively, sometimes , because he wants something from them; sometimes, simply because he wants to assert his power as the boss hood. Carrot says to Knockout Ned, “they’ll do anything for power….that maniac and those trigger-happy fools.” All the boys behave the way they think “real men” do, and because the role models they choose make bad decisions, the children do to. Otto says , “I smoke , snort, I’ve killed and robbed. I’m a man.” Otto behaves in the same way Lil’ Ze’s generation did when they were younger, by learning from Lil’ Ze. The Runts, the youngest ones, are the ones who eventually are able to kill Lil’ Ze by ganging up on him together. The older hoods can’t kill him, only the younger ones can.
Rocket seems to be the only character to escape the drug war, for the most part. Yes, he buys and smokes pot, however, he does not kill anyone over drug turf like Lil’ Ze. In fact, the only person he kills, Benny, he kills by accident.
Because Rocket is immersed in the drug war, but not actively participating in it, he is able to take pictures of Lil’ Ze’s drug gang and get an internship at the newspaper for it. At first he is worried, but then he realizes this is his ticket to a real job. He says, “Maybe I was going to die, but now I had a camera. I could be a photographer.” To Rocket, the prospect of making his life better is worth an almost death.
