Watching a chicken running in the road and lots of boys running after that with guns. Well what? Guns to catch up a chicken. Yes. That's what you get to see in the beginning which has flipped my expectations about the name of the movie how that would be.
"City of god" is a slum in the 'rio de janeiro' of brazil. I didn’t see any human rights there. Power is everything which even leads the kids to pick up the gun and shoot. How poverty leads a generation towards
crime is clearly visible here.
It shows a story of three generations if I count them through three teenage years. The main character Li'l Ze who was firstly with a group of three boys named of "tender Trio'' as a kid (he was then named as Li'l Dice) who was watching over cops coming while they were looting a brothel.Suddenly the story gone away when we saw that kid killing them laughingly to get joy. That tender trio splits and after a few years we see Li'l Ze running everything on the 'City of god' with his friend Benny.
Drug business, power,violation, killings are the regular scene there and moving with the story we even saw that benny fall in love and thought of leaving from this chaos but he eventually got killed and somehow couldn’t move forward towards a new life. Li'l ze was unstoppable. He was moving forward to eliminate the last enemy of him who was Benny's friend but got encountered with another new problem with Knockout Ned. Li'l ze raped his girlfriend and even killed his brother and uncle which led him to get into the rivalry with Li'l ze. Two gangs fights one after one in the end Knockout ned was caught by the police and Li'l Ze was murdered.
The interesting thing was the murder of Li'l Ze, in our society we often see criminals getting away bribing the police so did he. Police took all his money and things and freed him. In the gangwar he lost his men's and now his money which so he was not capable of ruling as he doesn’t has any power. Who murdered him? Some kids gang like his teenage (Li'l dice) murdered him and took control over the "city of god".
The way he built his rule of power over the city in the same way it took his life. But you know I am missing another interesting character here which walked on the opposite side of all these crimes, towards his dream. Rocket, the narrator of the movie, had a dream to be a photographer. His brother was one of the "Tender Trio" who was killed by Li'l Ze still he didn’t walk towards this path of crime to take any revenge in spite of staying in a place like "City of god". In the end he was successful in his dream.
In the full time there was only a lust of power for which killing was just a stairs. Even on a mere excuse we see violence over and over again. That rural place should have been given the name " City of Crime" instead of "City of God" as there are not any kinds of godly things rather than all kinds of crime.