REDACTED
(Magnolia Pictures, 2007)

By Alex Ballard

A UNIT of bored US soldiers stationed at a checkpoint in Samarra, Iraq, become the focus of one trooper's amateur movie-making in Brian De Palma's latest offering.

Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz) intends to make a documentary about life in the military and, as is the wont of most who grasp a camera during times of both ennui and stress, becomes obsessed with life behind the lens.

His footage initially paints a predictable if somewhat colorful picture of his comrades in arms, who are eager to get Stateside and tend to despise the people they stop and search every day.

However, following a shocking incident in which one of his squad mates, Reno Flake (Patrick Carroll) guns down a heavily pregnant woman at a checkpoint, Salazar's material becomes more akin to that of a contemporary Robert Capa as he films a number of frontline conflicts.

Reprisals soon follow the death of the woman as the unit's master sergeant is killed, which in turn spurs Flake and his hulking buddy BB Rush (Daniel Stewart Sherman) to embark on an act of hideous violence, raping and murdering a 15 year old Iraqi girl before slaughering her family.

The incident itself, based upon the rape and murder of 14 year old Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi by US troops in Mahmudiyah, March 2006, acts as the film's core, and the sequences are delivered with brutal power.

Throughout the entire ordeal Salazar simply continues to shoot his footage, unwittingly becoming complicit in the crime before being abducted and savagely executed by 'insurgents'.

Redacted, which means 'edited' or 'blacked out,' presents its narrative not only through Salazar's first person perspective on events, but also through a number of different mediums, from online blogs and security cameras to YouTube clips.

As a result it's a very dynamic and, at times, powerful film, which will no doubt court controversy upon general release, and credit to De Palma for tackling an issue that many would simply run from for fear of bad press; it's a film with a point to make, and, indeed, a point that needs to be made. The director addressed the underlying themes here once before, in 1989’s Casualties of War, but Redacted’s inventive multi-media construction applies them to the Iraq war in a manner that is fresh and authentic.

In terms of its contemporary themes and its gritty realism, Redacted is perhaps the film to bring the war movie genre into the 21st century; it's almost flawlessly produced and edited, with very little wasted screen time and a flowing narrative that effortlessly ties in the variety of visual mediums mentioned above.

The one major point of contention here is with the film's conclusion, and what is undoubtedly contrived to be Redacted's most controversial aspect; as the film ends, De Palma runs a montage of real photographs featuring dead and severely wounded Iraqi civilians.

The sequence, which may not make the final cut of the US release - ironically providing audiences with a redacted Redacted - seems an archetypal double edged sword; yes, the tragedy and suffering depicted is incredibly moving, but there's also a feeling, at least with this writer, that using the footage seems somewhat inappropriate and even insensitive.

A number of war movies have sought to present vivid and incredibly disturbing images, from Coppola's Apocalypse Now to Klimov's Idi i smotri (or Come and See), but the vast majority of filmmakers responsible for these visual critiques rarely felt the need to augment their narratives by employing real images of war victims in such graphic detail as De Palma does here - most clearly felt they had already made their various points throughout the movie and didn't require such vivid embellishment.

That aside, Redacted is a gripping, harrowing insight into life in the occupied territories which also manages to exude a brutal honesty that simply isn't present in many productions at present; De Palma will certainly challenge the hearts and minds of many with this powerful piece of cinema.


Photos courtesy Magnolia Pictures.