Redacted

Based on the 2006 Mahmudiyah killings where Abeer Qasim Hamza, a 14 year old Iraqi girl, was gang-raped, murdered, and burnt by U.S. soldiers, Redacted forthrightly deals with burgeoning anti-American sentiment, by, well, inflaming it.

Awkwardly based on the event itself – despite director Brian De Palma’s insistence that it's a fictionalisation – Redacted is rife with not-so-subtle insinuation and isn’t afraid to raise its head above the parapet. De Palma deserves kudos for tackling such a sensitive event in an increasingly hostile politic and religious climate, but having been told by lawyers he couldn’t use anything real about the event itself, his decision to sidestep the fact that all the soldiers involved in the killings were tried and convicted, is a crucial misjudgement that tarnishes the film’s scathing intentions.

In an attempt to get into film school, Private Angel Salazar decides to film a warts and all account of his experiences in Iraq. It briefly follows the Jarhead thread, showing soldiers as the bored, nervous, aggressive men, trained to kill but ordered to work within their strict directives: in this case, manning a roadside checkpoint. Here De Palma makes a clear point of documenting the perils and confusion associated with such a responsibility, pointing out that despite the warning signs in both Arabic and English, the vast majority of the Iraqi population are illiterate, rendering the signs useless. The lack of knowledge and communication, coupled with the soldiers tension, ultimately lead to death and disaster.

There are somewhat lazy portrayals of the type Armed Forces makeup – from the testosterone fuelled jarhead (Rush) and the conscientious apple pie eating all-American (McCoy), there’s also the, unassuming intellectual (Blix), and the loose canon (Flake). The exception to the rule is Salazar, the compromised solider and wannabe journalist. Compelled to show everything, he unwittingly films everything from the assertive aggression of Rush to McCoy’s crisis of conscience during and after the killings. Then there’s the unhinged Flake, whose increasing failure to deal with the tedium of conflict, sees his psyche chillingly degenerate.

While you can’t criticise De Palma’s motivation, you can his delivery of what’s essentially a brazen attack on US Foreign Policy and its military. In a country with a war time President, finding a sympathetic audience was always going to be problem, but it’s not exactly palatable to even the most fervent anti-war sentiment when it’s delivered without thought or subtlety. In his unwavering passion, De Palma has taken a stance of action over inaction, and it’s this hot headed approach that undermines Redacted’s appeal. It feels contrived, the faux-documentary approach failing to capture the desperation of the soldier’s situation, and perhaps the most important message it’s trying to convey is lost: man is capable of as much atrocity as he is imagination. Redacted needed a bit more of the latter.

Released on DVD on 21st July 2008 by Optimum.

Written by Reef Younis.