At the start of Brian De Palma’s new film Redacted comes an unmistakeable – but potentially ironic – statement of intent, as grunt Angel Salazar (whose video-camera footage comprises – among news segments, youtube videos, and documentary clips – the motion picture viewed by the audience) states that his intention is to reveal the truth of the Iraq war, omitting nothing, censoring nothing; he intends to impassively reveal the totality of his subject matter. No wonder the man has already failed to get into film school – since the first piece of celluloid sped through the interior workings of the first projector, directors have been aware of the impossibility of showing everything.
The video diary, along with everything else in the film, bar the photographs that comprise the epilogue, is fabricated. Like the recent Cloverfield, the film plays games with the concept of user-generated content, and the hook of the illusion of an un-biased proletarian viewpoint. The style, as it is utilised here, has promise: the moments the narrative is hijacked by news bulletins and internet-based clips have an exciting palpability, as though our own flicking through channels and web-surfing is gradually revealing the story of a small group of US soldiers stationed in Samarra who, tired and fidgety, decide to rape a young Iraqi girl.
However, scenes of the horrendous act itself fail to convince because of the increasingly irrational passivity of the filmmaker Salazar, and the ridiculous high quality of his image and sound. Supposed security camera clips also disappoint, the static viewpoint, unnatural dialogue and raw acting evoking a hastily put together student play about the horrors of war.
The film does not cohere, but was never intended to: the fragmented pieces of evidence and story given to the audience demonstrating the fractured manner in which news of an overseas war reaches the television-viewing public. But all the pieces, however subconsciously, strike the same tone, and that tone is resoundingly Anti-War. The potential heroism and bravery of the soldiers is never addressed, characters becoming empty shells, the kind of which one can get a head-start on by re-viewing De Palma’s earlier stab at a similar topic, the more successful Casualties of War. People are either vicious bastards, anguished academics, or an amorphous suffering mass; the discounting of the heritage or personality (or basic intelligence) of the Iraqi people is perhaps a worse violation of a culture than that perpetrated on the fifteen year-old girl who suffers at the hands of the stars and stripes.
Interesting questions are raised about spectatorship, voyeurism, and the increasingly present feedback loop of media consumption and production, but these are things that De Palma has tackled before and can do in his sleep. The anti-war message of the piece, driven home in the final minutes, is cloying and simplistic, and forces an audience to ask why fictionalisation was necessary if the facts are as they are insisted to be; and if a story needed to be fabricated, why allow it to be written so ungraciously, and painted in the broadest of strokes? If Redacted was De Palma’s effort to get into UCLA film school I have no doubt he would be a shoe-in; if only the film attempted to be as self-aware with its own politics as it does with its format.
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