Redacted (2007)

It's hard to believe this is from the same person who directed "Scarface". This is "The Blair Witch Project" meets "Full Metal Jacket" meets "Loose Change". It really watches like some teenager decided to make a war movie after spending a weekend watching Vietnam flicks. Has De Palma ever met anyone in the military? Has he ever worked a set where there were ex-military advisers (like most military themed movies use)? The problems with this movie are five-fold. First, the storyline is somewhat cartoonish. Second, the characters are just copies of some of the worst war movie stereotypes. De Palma obviously based the "Rush" character on Leonard "Private Pyle" Lawrence in "Full Metal Jacket". Flake is a clone of PFC Louden Downey in "A Few Good Men", or perhaps Lennie Small from "Of Mice and Men". Third, some of the Internet scenes make me wonder if De Palma has ever been online or used a web browser. They are just odd. Four, the facility the Army members use as their bunk house has all kinds of industrial equipment, including a big, pale blue wall with gauges and levers like the engine room out of a 1950's sci-fi flying saucer. Fifth, and most importantly, the story is just bad, and really hard to believe. I don't mean the rape/murder, I mean everything else The "interrogation" scene of SPC McCoy makes no sense. First, in a legal investigation, why is an NCO interrogating someone? A JAG officer would be doing that, or in a non-legal investigation, an assigned officer would be doing it.

Literally every scene, with the exception of the very first scene, is like it was done by clueless teenagers and leaves any non-ignorant person saying to themselves "it would never happen that way". Down to the bizarre (and totally implausible) final scene, where McCoy breaks down but his buddy still demands a photo of him and his wife, and the totally weird applause for McCoy from the bar crowd.

This movie is best described as the "Plan 9 from Outer Space" of war movies. No, make that the "Showgirls" of war movies. That's a better comparison. What "Showgirls" is to "My Fair Lady", "Redacted" is to war movies.

But it is worse than that, and here is why.

Every character with any relation to the military, with the sole exception of SPC McCoy, is depicted as corrupt. Even McCoy's father does not support his son. We get the impression the senior McCoy was a career military man, either an officer or senior NCO, but he tries to get his son to not report what happened. That just does not seem believable. And he refers to what it would do to "The Corps". The Corps is the Marines, but the movie's characters were Army.

It is just so odd, I have to wonder if De Palma really wrote this film. He cannot do something that God-Awfully bad. I mean, it reminds me of a middle eastern soap opera you might see on Palestinian television, the caricatures are so, so bad. Filled with stereotypes, bad stories, and just oddness.

De Palma could have made a good movie, using the basic concepts of "Redacted", but he did not.

Fmovies: The Iraq War drama Redacted is the worst kind of 'controversial' film. What I mean to say is that it's a movie so poorly made and acted, that no one would have had any reason to see it or talk about it if all the right-wing pundits - many of whom never even saw the film - simply kept their mouths shut for a change.

Whether or not you agree with the politics of Redacted, it's a work of bad film-making, plain and simple. However, because these Fox News and radio personalities bashed the film on the air and in print, it has suddenly become a far more 'important' film than it had any right to be. Mark Cuban, the film's producer, wrote on his blog that Bill O' Reilly was his "new best friend." Now that I have seen the film, I think Cuban should buy O'Reilly some flowers and a gold watch, too.

Redacted is an entirely fictional faux-documentary based on the 2006 Mahmudiyah killings, wherein a group of U.S. soldiers raped a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, and killed her along with her younger sister and parents. In the fictional recreation, there are two soldiers who are directly involved in the assault. The two soldiers are played by actors Patrick Carroll and Daniel Stewart Sherman.

As characters, Carroll and Sherman's soldiers lack so much dimension, it's almost like the actors decided to play their characters at one speed: "villain." Their performances might have been passable as the bad guys in a cheap revenge movie from the 80's, but for a drama that demands to be taken seriously, it's very distracting. By the time we get to the rape scene, which should have been harrowing to watch, I was reduced to a state of apathy because of the duo's over-the-top performance and the exploitative manner in which it was shot.

Sherman's role as a soldier might very well be one of the greatest intentional casting blunders in film history, and I found him to be most distracting of all. The actor is too overweight to play a combat-ready soldier. This was obviously a cheap attempt by writer- director Brian DePalma to further demonize a character who was already bad enough because of his crimes, vulgarity and frequent racial slurs. On top of that, every time I saw Sherman on screen, I couldn't help thinking that the U.S. military would not deploy a soldier who could not run, and would be the least-challenging target for enemy snipers.

But what really hurts Redacted from the very beginning is its premise of pretending to be a multi-media collage culled from several video sources. These sources include Middle- Eastern news footage, scenes from a French documentary, internet videos and a video diary from a U.S. soldier among others. Strangely, despite the fact that these videos supposedly came from different sources, most of them look like they were shot by the same photographer using the same cameras. While DePalma might have been kind enough to include a caption at the bottom of the screen to let us know where each source came from, it's apparent the filmmaker did not master their visual textures, styles or even potential.

Comprising most of the film is the video diary, which is also the most vexing of the movie's sources. The Hispanic soldier recording it (Izzy Diaz) claims to be doing so because he wants to get into film school. However, his footage is too dumbed-down by amateur editing transitions to believe anyone who studied film today - and had any hope of continuing to do so in college - would have used them. More

Great movie. Unfortunately was released in 15 theater! 15!!! It's a shame. Thanks to Brian de Palma for taking the time to do other movies than commercial movies, to put his name on a simple little budget but yet powerful movie. See this movie. It doesn't matter if you're against this war or if you approve it. If you think the film is a politic statement and you don't like it, just look at the last 5 minutes of the movie. It could have been any war. It's just a reality, an awful reality. I am sure the movie will do way better in Europe as far as the number of screens showing it. I do not want to talk about the movie itself, the comment right above says it all! I just wish people would see this movie for what it is: a sad testimony of our sad world. You didn't see it in the theater, then rent it, buy it, download it...

Redacted fmovies. Despite the many criticisms by others on this site, Redacted is a compelling film based on an actual incident that occurred in Baghdad in 2006. Yes, the acting leaves something to be desired, the 'mixed-media' approach is distracting, and there are some manipulative moments (the beheading, the final still); But this is still an eye-opening film on the state of events in Iraq and the trials that *both* Iraqis and Americans have to deal with daily. The scenes at the checkpoint are particularly well done. Some of the dialog between the soldiers in the unit is compelling in its own way; Similarly so the scenes with the Iraqi reporters and 'embeds.'

I've seen all the recent films about Iraq ('Valley of Elah', 'Lions for Lambs', 'Rendition' ) and think that 'Redacted' provides insights none of the others do. In particular, it does an excellent job illustrating the clash between the respective cultures of Iraq and America. (50% of Iraqis can't read the signs at US checkpoints!)

Is this film a bit of an unholy mess? Yes, but see it anyway and make your own mind up. I think this one deserves at least a 6 out of 10.

The legendary words of Marshall MacLoughan, "The media IS the message", couldn't be further seen played out as in Redacted, Brian De Palma's latest film which ventures the director back into his experimental early days as a filmmaker in New York city. In his film, the media is the message, but only in part- it's about how media is used, or how subjective perceptions are taken into account, for coverage of a conflict which ironically enough has not had the kind of coverage seen in America as in the local Iraq and European media. But what stays true to De Palma as an auteur is the idea of voyeurism, or the watchers and the audience as the ones who continue to watch, and like Godard with his video experiments, Redacted is about its subject but it's also about process.

Like Blair Witch Project, we're seeing things "as-they-happen" by the view-point of a camera that a soldier, Angel, is carrying and using as an in to get into film school someday. This might be enough for a film covering a horrible tragic turn of events like depicted in Redacted, where two soldiers rape a teenager and kill and burn her and her baby sister. But De Palma's story, based on real events which were "fictionalized" up to a point only for legal reasons, indicts the whole process of viewing things through the filter of the lens. Of course there are moments when the characters realize that they're on video, and suddenly they either get irate and continue acting as themselves, or they start to posture for the camera. Instead of the carefully plotted and directed shots of films like Dressed to Kill or Carlito's Way (or, for that matter, the similar-in-premise Casualties of War) we get the messiness of raw camera-work from the soldier, the embedded journalists, the news media covering the story, web-casts obviously out of you-tube, and as the one "official" kind of film-making a French documentary crew doing a film on the group of soldiers covering the checkpoint.

It's suffice to say that this technique is almost a comment on itself, and it's one of the curious ideas behind the experiment of Redacted that makes it interesting. We know that when a security camera or when Angel's camera put on a seat meant to be shut off captures objectively what's going on- like the "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" scene or the plot to go after the family. But there's an inverse to this as well since De Palma is filming this with a script and with actors (who arguably are good at being naturalistic two-dimensional soldiers), since there is a stylization, yet without calling attention to the self-consciousness the audience feels during this. And meanwhile, De Palma makes his anti-war film gripping in the unexpected places; a hard-ass sergeant who gets blown up without any warning at all; the death of one of the soldiers as revenge from a terrorist group; the scene with Flake and Rush where they take the camera themselves and (as proof beyond a doubt that war and repeated tours of duty have made them bat-s***) defend themselves while attempting to praise a fallen brother while one wears a duck hat.

One almost hopes the experiment would work even better as one of the director's best, which ultimately it isn't. Certain tactics, like making evident the pretentiousness of the French documentary by having Barry Lyndon orchestrations playing over, or the girl on the fake you-tube site blasting the soldiers, just don't work at all. And a few of the per

Brian de Palma's Redacted ups the ante of protest films, fictionally recounting the rape and murder of a 14-year old Iraqi girl by U.S. soldiers in 2006. Using hand-held camera surveillance footage, Internet videos, excerpts from a French documentary and an Arab TV channel, Islamic fundamentalist websites, and the fictional camcorder diary of a young U.S. private, Redacted lets us know not only about the atrocities of war but about the unreliability of the way in which information is presented in the media and how we cannot trust what we see, even in his film.

Modeled after de Palma's earlier Casualties of War, Redacted searches for a truth in fiction that is deeper than reality-based documentary. Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz) carries a video camera around shooting whatever he sees hoping to make a documentary that will be his ticket to film school. We are first introduced to his unit: Gabe Blix (Kel O'Neil), Lawyer McCoy (Rob Devaney), Sergeant Jim Sweet (Ty Jones) and good ol' boys, Reno Flake (Patrick Carroll) and B.B. Rush (Daniel Stewart Sherman). The videos make it apparent that our soldiers have lost their sense of purpose and are no longer on solid emotional ground.

The hand held video camera is then replaced by a French documentary about the soldier's routine at checkpoints in Samarra. Suddenly, a speeding car is approaching. Interpreting the signals by U.S. personnel to slow down as meaning they are being waved on through, the car is gunned down, killing a pregnant woman and her unborn child as the driver After a member of Salazar's unit is killed by a bomb, the two men who fired on the speeding car, Rush and Flake, invade the home of an Iraqi family in retribution and to enjoy the "spoils of war". In the middle of the night, they rape and murder a fourteen-year old girl, kill her family, and set the house on fire.

The sensitive Blix does not want to be involved with the mission, and McCoy goes along to try and prevent more harm but fails to stop the violence. Flake and Rush tell the rest of the company that any word of this incident will result in their death. The incident is seen only with a flickering light and the actual assault takes place off camera, but the scene nonetheless elicits a feeling of disgust. As if to try and show that the horrors of war are not limited to one side, de Palma shows the abduction and beheading of a U.S. soldier in very graphic terms. In the final gut wrenching sequence, a montage labeled "Collateral Damage" brings truth and fiction together as we see actual footage of Iraqi war victims mixed with staged deaths and faces that are redacted with black pens.

While Redacted is flawed by inconsistent acting and overly didactic add-ons, its impact is extremely powerful. De Palma indicts both the stupidity of the U.S. government for initiating the war, the complicity of the media in presenting us with a sanitized version of it, and a culture in which such atrocities are permitted to occur. Like the films of French director Bruno Dumont that show how meaningless violence generates more meaningless violence, the visceral impact of Redacted will stay with you for a long time. Slapping us in the face to show us how we have lost touch with the reality of war, the film is full of elemental passion, untidy, disjointed, and at times over-the-top, but in Dumont's words, it returns us "to the body, to the heart, to truth".