Redacted: War is Truly Hell

Brian De Palma is covering familiar ground with Redacted, but then again, the world is covering familiar ground with the Iraq war, so it’s fitting. I’d been wondering when this current horror show was going to be given the same cinematic treatment the Vietnam War received.

De Palma himself did it with Casualties of War, his 1989 film where U.S. soldiers committed a horrible rape and murder of a Vietnamese girl, and Redacted is much the same content, albeit portrayed with a vastly different style that mirrors the mobile personal media culture of the present day. “How could these boys have gone so wrong?” De Palma asks. “In searching for the answers, I read soldiers’ blogs, books, watched soldiers’ home made war videos, surfed their websites and their YouTube postings. It was all there, and all in video.”

De Palma uses that as the justification for shooting the film in high-definition video, but it’s also the reason the movie is laid out as it is - mixing viewpoints between a soldier filming what goes on in the barracks with his own camera, a French documentary, internet video postings and, essentially, an Al-Jazeera style network. It’s realistic and it’s brutal, and definitely not for the faint of heart. It’s designed to give us the untold stories redacted from reality by the sound-bite culture or, in De Palma’s words, “Main Stream Corporate Media.”

The story follows a small squad of soldiers charged with guarding a military checkpoint, where they’re in charge of searching every car and every person that walks through it, although a statistic is given that nearly half of all Iraqis are illiterate, so they don’t always know what all the signs are telling them to do, and they occasionally do horrible things like gunning down a pregnant woman on her way to the hospital because the car she was in doesn’t stop. That incident causes strife within the unit, because the gunman, Reno Flake (Patrick Carroll), thinks he was just doing his job, whereas Lawyer McCoy (Rob Devaney) thinks he should be feeling at least some remorse for it. When Flake and his best pal Rush (Daniel Stewart Sherman) get hammered and start talking about nuking the country and paving it over because all of the “hajis” deserve it, McCoy and Gabe Blix (Kel O’Neill) try to talk some sense into them, only to get threatened and smacked around for their trouble, while Salazar (Izzy Diaz) tries to play neutral observer to film everything.

The horror show plays out as expected - not as graphic as it could’ve been, but still gruesome and disturbing. The guilt that plagues those with a conscience afterwards starts to tear them apart, and when the surviving members of the victim’s family wreak vengeance with a horrendously graphic beheading of one of the soldiers, everything starts to unravel.

The film stresses that it depicts “imagined events” around a crime widely reported to have happened. When anti-war talking points are woven into the dialog, that’s when it starts to shake out of the realism and remind us that what we’re watching isn’t necessarily real. There’s most definitely an agenda, which De Palma unapologetically confirms. “If we are going to cause such disorder, then we must face the horrendous images that are the consequences of these actions. Once we saw them in Vietnam, our citizens protested and brought that misguided conflict to and end. Let’s hope the images from this film have the same effect.”

It is, however, a damn good approximation of reality, and it closes with a montage of actual bloody images from this war in Iraq, and the catastrophic toll being paid in human lives.

It’ll make you hate the world.