dave-53-435608 Now that it is 8 years since the film came out and 12 years since the Iraq War, there is a lot of comedy that comes through, raising the entertainment value of this film. You may criticize the contrivances through a dramatic lens, but as comedy, it's more realistic!Back when it came out, it was probably easy to dismiss the film as propaganda, but with 8 more years of digital media and internet savvy under our belts, more of us can probably agree now, what isn't propaganda? Manipulation of every story is a given, either on purpose, or by ignorance. Corporate media has priorities and so do individual bloggers - reasonable priorities including their own survival and raison d'etre. The context and intention is what makes a fact exist, not a blind hard-on for what you believe is truth or morality. Otherwise you are a already victim, who will cause others to become victims. What is your intention, and how does your art and voice fall in line with it? That is the true acid test that can be accounted for, objectively. The more of these honest voices we have that are heard, we are not hostage to one "official story" of one intention, and thereby we can get closer to having our own voice heard.De Palma showed how weak and helpless we all are, all around. If that was his intention, he was in line with it. I haven't seen any other modern war film accomplish this, as honestly. In fact, I felt a lot of sympathy for the bad soldiers, because they were just weak-minded kids with no prospects who were given a license to kill, without being educated. Critics have argued against the film, saying that the soldiers in "real" life went to jail. That's a little too easy and naive way to say justice was served. Actually, it's a comic shame that the crime they committed might even be the height of their life's glory. They are just young fools with hard-ons they can't control, put into battle by nameless politicians elected by nameless citizens. They were weak enough to become criminals and we led them to the crime. In this country, it's not like anyone forces us who to elect as our representatives. No one likes to admit we have blood on our hands. We fear like any other person does. To acknowledge we are all fools, is the only way to move forward.

alr126 I just finished watching this film and reading some of the reviews, it's amazing how clueless people can be.I think a film such as this could very well be real, or at least the premise of the film be based on an actual event.It's sad to see how principals, morality and discipline can go right out the window under certain situations.It is also sad that our government would probably go to the same extremes depicted in the film to cover up these same events. How can these people sleep at night, let alone live with themselves.The acting wasn't the greatest, but, I don't think Mr. DePalma had that in mind when casting this film. He wanted something like a video diary of actual soldiers in an awful situation and the horrendous outcome.It seems that in wars that occur in places like this, Bosnia, etc., it's the children that suffer.

dunmore_ego Iraq calls America The Great Satan.REDACTED shows us why. Written and directed by Brian de Palma, we follow a small cadre of American troops for a few explosive havoc days of rape and murder in Samara, Iraq. Based on a real account of the rape and murder of a 15-year-old Samara girl, I researched the web for this particular incident... and ended up reading dozens of other cases.I stopped searching. Nothing unique about this movie's incident. It had become common practice with the ignorant thugs who had become the lowest swine on the planet - the Amerikan Military. (An Iraqi soldier comments that REDACTED shows one rape - while he has witnessed thousands.) ...And the Great Satan coalesces, laughing worms.American Military, like mongrels off their leashes, create more terrorism towards Iraqis than the other way 'round. And - at the risk of sounding like a broken record - one man bears the brunt of this blame. George W. Bush.Film aims so hard at being "reality TV" (by being lensed through various security cams, embedded reporter footage, hidden terrorist cams, cellphone video, online wives' videos, Arabic website footage, etc. - there are no actual "movie camera" master shots and cutaways), that the "natural" acting is anything BUT.The first action vignette is beautifully staged, as soldiers fight to keep their eyes open at a dull checkpoint, while Handel's Sarabande in D minor lulls us into a false sense of quietude. De Palma plays this scene like a French documentary, showing us the complications at just this one checkpoint. As the American troops describe how they've set up extensive Iraqi signage outlining checkpoint procedures, a French narrator tells us that studies show over half of Iraqis are illiterate; which means most of them cannot read the instructions and have no idea of checkpoint protocol at the Terrorist Amerikan Checkpoints.After nothing happening all day, all hell breaks loose when a car doesn't stop at its prescribed point. A pregnant woman is killed, and we see the massacre through the eyes of a non-American news report.Removing us from provincial American reportage enables us to perceive the incident with clearer vision; then de Palma drops us back into the ignorant provincialism of the American grunt camp; utterly remorseless and flippant, they refuse to comprehend how other cultures might misinterpret their hand signals or speech, blaming the driver for the massacre.Many would argue that these men are not representative of American soldiers. But if SOME soldiers are like this, it means those "some" are representing America. REDACTED raises the horrifying reality that these "some" are not the exception - they are the rule. We would know this if the information dribble from war zones was not being "redacted" by the duplicitous government (whole pages, lines and incriminating evidence obscured or removed from reports before being released to the public). Like "Rendition" or "Enhanced Interrogation," Redacted is merely another Great Amerikan Euphemism.The swinish Bushies will protest, "It's only a movie!" But even if we negate the atrocities these soldiers perpetrate, the checkpoints in that foreign land are a reality - CAUSING more violence and death than they curb (which Bush and his cabbagehead general, Petraeus, and puppetfool Bremer, refuse to acknowledge). "Over a 24-month period, U.S. troops killed 2,000 Iraqis at checkpoints. 60 were confirmed insurgents. No U.S. soldiers were charged in any of these incidents."The stars of REDACTED are all unknowns, so when the hard bigotry comes, we accept it: "nuke 'em all... scorched earth... ragheads... dwarf Ali Babas..." every insult you've ever heard is compacted into this movie.The Amerikan Military and Propaganda Government have dehumanized the Iraqis so morbidly that American grunts feel entitled to these objects as "spoils of war"; premeditating and performing the rape and murder of the 15-year-old girl was just another rowdy frat night for the rapists, even though some of the troop protested - but not enough to actually STOP the incident.Grunts have been indoctrinated to believe they are performing a FAVOR for Iraq by "overthrowing Saddam, bringing democracy to them - and not even a thank you!" Yet the fact that their Christian feet are on Islamic soil only increases the hostility - an Arab religious tenet is to keep non-Islamic feet off their "holy" land. but George W. Bush will never "get" it.As revenge for the 15-year-old girl, a soldier is kidnapped and beheaded by Iraqis. But now de Palma shows us the American version of this news, and we see exactly how deluded and in denial the American government keeps itself, as a military spokesman talks of the "barbaric and brutal nature of the terrorists and their complete disregard for human life." And though one soldier wants to bring charges against his own men, the first thing that comes into question in American courts is the sanity of the soldier bringing the charges. The frustration of this insular system of denial and protectionism will make your head swell and smoke come out your ears.Ironically, de Palma's movie ends with redactions that the movie studios made before release, in a last brutal segment called "Collateral Damage - Actual pictures from the Iraq War." We do not see every picture de Palma intended us to see. But we see enough: children with burned skin, screaming. Families holding their heads, screaming, while their child lies slaughtered on the ground; a man cradling his naked son, covered in blood; splotches of blood all over a screaming child's dress; a dead woman with eyes wide open, lying in a pool of blood, her limbs removed. This last picture is apparently the Samara girl.And only one question raises its ugly, swollen weasel head: When will The Great Satan, George W. Bush, be brought to justice?

IceboxMovies 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.