Fernando Mereilles and Katia Lund's 2002 film "City of God" is a triumph. It earned four Academy Award nominations and wide praise by telling the story of a handful of young people growing up with and in one of Rio de Janeiro's infamous favelas, the "City of God" ("Cidade de Deus" in its native Portuguese). It managed to mix its protagonists' innocence with the mischief and danger of gang life to much effect while also portraying how Brazilian society has shuffled these young people out of site, refusing to invest in their futures.
This is all to say that the six-part HBO Original Series "City of God: The Fight Rages On" has a lot to live up to. It's not as strong as the film that inspired it, but it's still a smart series with insight into what life is like in its favela. It takes place twenty years after the events of the film, mixing many of the same elements. Most of the original cast returns (notably minus Alice Braga), and the series uses many of the same visual effects.
The setting is also back, the titular favela having grown up with its characters, now more crowded and decrepit. Drug dealers still rule the streets, their wars terrorizing the residents. While our hero Wilson, aka Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues), smoked some joints and had some fun doing it in the original, the drugs are now mostly off-screen: spoken of, but no longer powering any party.
In fact, the party is largely absent in "The Fight Rages On." Rocket is all grown up with a fifteen-year-old daughter (he did more than lose his virginity after all!), and he judges her for her taste in music. Leka (Luellem de Castro) is a singer, headlining the City of God's local club by performing explicit sex-positive songs. That she has so much confidence and stage presence so young doesn't seem to impress Rocket. He's unable and unwilling to connect with her, having passed his parenting responsibilities to his mother.
So yeah, Rocket has gone from bopping in the DJ booth to shaking his head at the MC - he's a killjoy, and "City of God: The Fight Rages On" has lost some of its joy alongside him. With its cast mostly in middle age, "The Fight Rages On" doesn't have the same sense of exuberance as the original. It also lacks that languid quality that defined the film, depicting teens with too much time on their hands.
Instead, the first episode matches the pace of the film's fight scenes - loud with a dizzying number of quick cuts and characters talking quickly. But in the series, they're dropping exposition that feels bloated and hard to follow between all the competing elements. Eventually, the pace lessens, but, at least in the first two episodes available to critics to screen, there's no relaxation—just a slight loosening of the frenzy.
Sometimes, when pieces of cinema get updated, their creators aim to fix issues with the original. See "And Just Like That…" adding all those women of color characters to balance the blinding whiteness of "Sex and the City." And there's a bit of that here. The 2002 film trucked in a soft, benevolent sexism, which the series tries to correct. Braga played an idealized, unattainable sex object in the film while her darker-skinned peers (Roberta Rodrigues as Berenice and Sabrina Rosa as Cinthia, both returning) were more attainable and so doomed to tragedy. In the series, they appear to be getting their own plotlines, although their characterizations are mostly just "saint." So, it's a step up from "sinner," but still stuck in sexist tropes.
Worse is Andréia Horta as Jerusa, the worst kind of female character - she's all sex and bad decisions, causing a gang war with her hot temper and lacking any sort of depth or back story. She's a Jezebel and nothing more. There is hope in Eli Ferreira as Lígia, a reporter who might just teach Rocket something with her bravery and clear moral compass. He's worried he's been co-opted by the white power structure - he's made it as a photographer, but one whose career is based on selling Black death to white readers.
Even the sex and drugs have lost their fun over two decades since the original, but that's not to say that the series dishonors it. It echoes and advances many of the film's arguments and even tries to build upon the original's artistic imagery. While that 2002 film ends with shots through Rocket's viewfinder, the series relies on that trick too much - we get it, he's a voyeur - and the multitude of viewfinder shots overemphasizes the point. There's nothing as strong as the film's opening chicken-cooking montage in the series, either, but there's an attempt at artistry (more chickens!), and it's appreciated.
The series will have six episodes, so there's hope that the ones to follow will surpass what it did in the first two. By aging up its characters and only offering a few new teen ones, it's missing the optimism that comes with youth and instead appears stuck in a middle-aged malaise. Where to go next? How and if to change? "City of God: The Fight Rages On" isn't sure, but it knows its characters deserve to live, to have their stories told, to grow. And that's a pretty strong foundation.
Two episodes screened for review. Premieres on Sunday, August 25th on HBO Latino and Max.
