But similar problems plague most movies, and these mistakes do not detract from the emotional impact of Redacted or tarnish the film’s craftsmanship in any way.

Critics, who currently give the film a 57 percent Tomatometer rating, point to flaws in the dramatic logic and a few misjudged performances. Yet despite this daring strategy, the response to Redacted has been ambivalent. The complex style of Redacted feels like a Google search for “Iraq, war crimes.” This hyper-abundance of accessible media shows that the horrifying war is not just taking place on the ground in Iraq, but also, literally, in the terrain of cyberspace a place where everyone with a homepage is a resident, and where the rules of engagement are still being written. His patchwork story expertly addresses the Iraq conflict on its own terms, using the war’s own visual language: a soldier’s video diary is interwoven with a French documentary about military check points, which gets mixed in with Arab TV broadcasts, security camera footage from the army base, internet blogs by wives of the enlisted, webcam chats, recordings of judicial inquisitions, clips posted online by terrorists, YouTube rants, and a slew of still images (which ultimately give real-life footnotes to the fictionalized events).

Based on true events and told in documentary fashion, the movie uses a collage of digital media to portray the heinous crime up-close and personal, giving audience members every reason to look away but also, by doing so, asking us why it’s taken so long to cringe.ĭe Palma’s film presents the conflict through every facet available to us, the civilian viewers.

Brian De Palma fans beware: his most recent film will make you think that the veteran director has - to borrow a line from Full Metal Jacket - been “born again hard.” Redacted is a war drama centered on the rape and murder of a fifteen-year-old Iraqi girl at the hands of American soldiers.

Movie redacted