Redacted

Redacted certainly tries very hard. Based loosely on a real life tragedy in Iraq involving US soldiers who raped a young Iraqi woman and killed her family. Brian De Palma is right filled with outrage. He and we should be disturbed by such actions. We should wonder why such things happen. It is not per se that these soldiers are evil but in tense and hostile situations the psychological effects of war can be massive. And every time I hear about something that should outrage us, I wonder what the army was doing to try to prevent it. Not that I think there are any clear cut answers. And at the very least the film does make you think and does make you question.

Its format is like a cobbled together documentary. Consisting of "found" footage of a French documentary team, a soldier's video journal and various security cameras from bases and check points, we get the fictional narrative of a military unit responsible for a check point. We see what I guess is pretty close to accurate the procedure of a checkpoint and the frustration of soldiers who lose friends to IEDs and attacks. We see the pressure and the attempts to work off the stress.

The trouble is that it doesn't feel like a documentary, it feels forced and contrived. A gimmick. The acting is a little questionable and the primary evil doers don't really get anything resembling fully fleshed out characters. This is not an attempt to understand all sides nor does that need to be the intent but I think it does a disservice to solving problems to paint people as demons. Perhaps that is the historian in me. Near movie's end we get the briefest and oddest confession of one of the culprits about his brother that seems almost out of place.

The film ends with real photos of tragedy in Iraq that are disturbing and unsettling and clearly that is the point. But I ultimately feel a director as talented as De Palma could have shown us he was angry in a much better film.