Redacted (2007)

Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Most undeservingly overhyped movie of all time??

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Brian De Palma's film "Redacted", made in the form of documentary film, which gives more action and tension of true events in Iraq. We talk about the crimes covered up the U.S. military in Iraq, in peacetime 2006 g. The rape of 15-year-old girl and killing her family. Very startling film, with staff showing the true and original footage of the massacre in Iraq. I thought it was one of the many war movies, many of a hundred I watched. But, it pleasantly surprised me.

The medium is the message, so said Marshall McLuhan. This means of course that our reaction to news is dependent on how it is presented. We seeing is often more believable than reading for example.McLuhan would easily admit the Redacted is flawed, but at the same time he may just praise it for proving his point. Brian de Palma's latest film takes him away from what he has done for pretty much his entire career. This motion picture is very much a case of substance over style (not the other way around). Well I wouldn't say it has no style. de Palma still relies on a visual format to help, but this is new terrain for him. Redacted is a multimedia recreational documentary of events surrounding a gang rape in Iraq where a pair of US soldiers sexually assaulted and killed a fifteen year old girl. They were later turned in by their buddy who refused to take part. He got the news out on a Youtube video wearing a mask.At first glance, Reacted appears as a black-and-white statement; an anti American dis- approval of the war in Iraq. Even when one stops to think for a moment, it is still hard to deny that the film is against the war, but it is NOT necessarily anti American. De Palma is open to giving an explanation for why these boys would resort to such behaviour. It is not because they are dumb or under educated, but more because after spending so long so far away from home in dreadful conditions, they begin to loose a sense of humanity. There is a difference between being an ass and being crazy.Redacted's problem I think is not so much a question of smarts, but a question of set-up. The introduction feels too much like a Godard movie. De Palma's decision to use clips of a French documentary for setting exposition make the beginning seem kind of muddled and unclear. What is this movie about? the people or the place? Redacted's multi media approach has a very visceral effect on the viewer, but its side effect is that it is ill equips for story telling, due to a sense of choppiness. One of the downsides of realism, which I have never been partial to, but this one, is actually pretty good. I think it is educational, and strong enough to recommend

Redacted never made it to the cinemas here, and I wonder why, since it's presented mostly in the first-camera perspective in pseudo-documentary style which has always been popular with the horror genre at least, and has Brian De Palma at the helm, a director whom I always associate with making stylish films, from his impressive resume such as The Untouchables right up to The Black Dahlia.With Casualties of War he had already done an anti-war film, albeit it came a little too late, some two centuries after the Vietnam War, to critique on. So it's no wonder that with the Iraqi War that's still ongoing, and with public sentiments quite bewildered against a needless war (wherefore art thou WMD?) he had come out to write and direct a film that deals directly with the atrocities of war, any war for that matter, that aims its sights squarely on how Truth is always the first casualty, because what comes out will almost always be a slew of cover ups to mask cock ups and accidents, intentional or otherwise, that will have negative impact on those currently or have been involved.There are already a fair share of films both dramatic and action based that takes up this topic (the more recent one being Paul Greengrass' Green Zone), but De Palma's film is presented in a different fashion to put us, the audience, in the driving seat witnessing events as they unfold through cameras of various shapes, sizes and placed in different situations. With first person perspectives, it's usually through a single camera with an incredible battery life, but De Palma infuses common sensibilities in his film and involves multiple camera points of view to present a congruent narrative that's loosely based on the disgraceful Mahmudiyah atrocities as committed by the US military.So we see the entire episode, and what we normally see from the daily news networks, all rolled into one tight and grippingly paced film, through the eyes of a wannabe filmmaker soldier, documentary filmmakers, press corps embedded in raids, Arab and Eurp press members on the ground and over their respective news networks, videos through insurgent websites, responses through viral videos, webcam chats, surveillance cameras and so on. It's a breathtaking number of cameras involved, each presenting something different brought to the flow of the film, and if there's one person who can pull it all off convincingly, it's De Palma of course. One can imagine how world events get told nowadays, no longer relying on a single source for information, or a handful of sources, but an entire plethora of platforms to choose from thanks to technology and social media such as Twitter and Facebook, bringing us much closer to events from a first person perspective, where the man on the ground telling his actual, real time experience can garner a world wide audience at the click of a button.It's a powerful anti-war, or anti-Iraq-war for that matter, which follows a group of grunts whom we see performing their routine, rote duties of securing checkpoints and going through the tense checks they're tasked to perform, which keep everyone on the edge since Death can come knocking at any time should they slip up. De Palma doesn't sweep a lot of things under the carpet, and tells of how shootings become indiscriminate, of how cover ups are part and parcel of military reports and investigation outcomes, of the near certain circle of violence and revenge cycles each side get into. Definitely recommended material to sit through.

I am never going to forget this film. Not for as long as I live. Not for as long as I hold onto the love of cinema that I have always struggled so hard to keep kindled—keep burning—through anything; through thick and thin; through the lack of interest in film-making circulating in the grade schools, middle schools and high schools that I passed through and graduated from; through the overwhelming political apathy that has stung the state of Missouri in which I reside. It has been a long time since a contemporary film has held up a mirror to my face and shown me the kind of thinker, viewer, and audience member that I am. I found such a film in Redacted. It was the Brian De Palma film that I had always waited for. It is still the fiery, passionate film that will haunt me, provoke me, and perhaps even influence me when my future career comes knocking.But again: when our troops need our support at all times in order to help them win in a dangerous conflict, what good is there to tell a story that is not flattering—even if it is based on an incident that really happened? "It's a very sad story", De Palma admitted, but then he broke the ice by declaring of the film, "(that) you feel sorry for, obviously, the victims, but also the soldiers! Even the crazy ones! What got them that way?" That reminds me of the acting in the film itself. Medved called the acting "atrocious" in his review, while A. O. Scott, a liberal, wrote, "... most of the actors, many of them appearing for the first time in a feature film, lack either the skill or the directorial guidance to endow their characters with a full range of credible motives and responses." Both of these criticisms completely miss the point of De Palma's method, which is to prove that people who talk in front of home video cameras don't always act the way they might in real life; Roger Ebert correctly noted in his review (one of the better reviews of the film), that, because the acting of the film is less than flawless, it seems more real. In another positive review, Scott Foundas (who even went so far as to hail Redacted as one of the ten best films of the year) wrote, "...it is the entire point of Redacted that we are observing crude, found video objects, and that their subjects, aware of the camera that's recording them, assume the awkwardly self-conscious stances of people in vacation pictures and birthday-party videos." There are, however, moments when the acting in Redacted shines, and these moments almost always stem from the performance of Rob Devaney as McCoy. Those who say that Redacted is anti-troops obviously don't pay much attention to the McCoy character, who cannot hold back the guilt of witnessing and doing nothing to stop the rape, and finally decides that justice must be done. We are there with him every step of the way. As with Michael J. Fox in Casualties of War, we are rooting for him, and we sympathize with his guilt."Redacted deals with very moving material in a very new form," expressed De Palma in an interview with Simon Hattenstone, "and it may take a while for people to adjust to it. In time, they will come to accept it because all the information the Bush administration has been suppressing will come out, and we'll learn the terrible stories that they've been hiding from us for so long. Whether it finds it this year or in years to come, I just think the movie will find its audience." Will it really? I think so. Because our troops are still stationed in Iraq, it may be hard for some to appreciate the film when our reasons for occupying the country are still vastly unknown. But I also think Redacted will be admired, in time, because it is almost as if De Palma's career was preparing itself every step of the way for this film. When all the other directors chickened out, he responded by making a film that took U.S. occupation in Iraq head-on, no matter how many it troubled or offended. He was also willing to live with the painful consequences of what the characters—those of whom are still alive at the end—have survived. "I went on a raid in Samarra", confesses McCoy, now breaking down, "and two men from my unit raped and killed a fifteen-year old girl; and burned her body... and I didn't do anything to stop it." McCoy may have been unsuccessful, but De Palma found something else. He made Redacted, and with that, made one of the most perfectly constructed masterpieces of his career. For over forty years, Brian De Palma has been recognized as the modern Hitchcock and as a survivor of the Movie Brat era. In two years, he will be recognized as the filmmaker who ended the war.