When City Of God: The Fight Rages On opens, Buscapé, the weary photographer who goes by Rocket and is once again played by Alexandre Rodrigues with a comic sense of browbeat, is stuck in the same spot. He’s caught in the crossfire between rival gangs and police, just as we left him over two decades before; still holding the camera and narrating about the ways the cosmos keep putting him in tough spots. This time he drones on about how nothing has changed in his titular Rio de Janeiro favela as bullets whiz by, bodies pile up and he continues taking photos of the dead.
None of this should come as a surprise. The entire point of City of God, the Oscar-nominated 2002 crime drama directed by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, was that the fact-based violence it sensationalized was cyclical and inescapable. That’s a lesson that a long-running show like Narcos took to heart – and milked – satisfying an appetite for Goodfellas-in-the-favela content that City of God stoked.
