Aquel no era yo

After watching the strongest short that the Oscar-nominated short special had to offer, it's unfortunate to say we hit the weakest link with "Aquel No Era Yo" (That Wasn't Me), a Spanish short focusing on a group of doctors that are apprehended by child soldiers and are eventually taken hostage by extremely violent revolutionaries who are rebelling against their home country. If anything, the short shows how young minds without appropriate parental guidance are warped into believing just about whatever a seemingly-well-meaning adult will tell them while they're still young and naive enough to take orders. It, again, affirms the fact that these young children aren't so much villains but victims of the real villains - the older people that actually possess the ability to think on a larger scale. Instead, the adult revolutionaries pick up a large-caliber weapon, point it at everyone they see, and call it a method of recruitment and a way to gain power and respect by ways of fear. However, "Aquel No Era Yo" ditches this idea quite early in favor of shock and ugliness such as an unnecessary rape scene that does nothing but throw a wrench in the film's flow before ending on a contrived and entirely unbelievable note. When also accounting for the excellent photography and naturalistic gunfire as well as its depiction of brainwashing, but then also seeing that the pervasiveness of the gunfire makes it become a bit of an action movie and never that oriented on its characters, makes "Aquel No Era Yo" a somewhat-likable but entirely uneven mixed bag.