"The first casualty of this war is the truth."...says the poster and one of the soldiers right in the beginning of Brian de Palma's Redacted - and you ask back: "And so what?" I mean we aren't 5 years old children who believes in the coverages of the news channels or the propagandas of the deeply influenced media. And come on, tell me only one war which was about the truth. And I just remind you that here we, more precise de Palma is talking about the Iraq war, you know, the one where the brave (?) politicians (the last one among them is leaving his place this year...) during fighting against the terror (??) never found any weapons of mass destruction. If you still think that they told / tell about the truth, just watch this film:) Btw they must still searching (???) something there, at least the soldiers of democracy (????) are still there. Ok, stop me.
So if the content is too direct, and already told thousand times by others what is de Palma's excuse to make a 1001st version of it? It must be about the film's form: Redacted is redacted from different fictional materials, like news channels' footages, an imagined French documentary, a security camera's pictures, online streaming, the soldiers' night vision cameras and - of course - self made video diaries of the soldiers (The 'of course' refers to Cloverfield, Rec and all the other clones at the meeting of the technological revolution and Hollywood's searching for new forms of storytelling). As I said everything is fictious, "This film is enterily fiction, inspired by an incident widely reported to have occured in Iraq."
We have different styles and genres emotionalized by effective music (Handel's Sarabande used more motivated by Kubrick in his masterpiece Barry Lyndon), but the content remains too direct, very simple and - sorry to say - boring. I'm not talking about the terrible fact that raping a 15 years old girl is not disturbing anymore, but I believe if you show me 1001 times I'm getting bored and - what you really don't want - unsensitive for the topic. Even de Palma told similar story in his Viet-nightmare war crazyness (Causalties of War (1989) - what a nice reference for the motto of Redacted...) already! Another soldier tells: "We don't need another Abu Grabhi!" - he has right, definitely, more than de Palma ever intended.
Ok, I know there is an election coming in the US and A:), you have a drive to talk about the """truth""", but please, for your own sake don't treat your people as a child - otherwise they will behave so and you'll fail your final aim (see conditioned to be unsensitive..).
"I can't afford remorse." - says a soldier. And I agree, so I must say forget this one, and watch something really really BIG from de Palma, for example his unbelievable "series" from the eighties (these movies came right after each other within 4 years!) like Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, Scarface and my personal favourite Body Double.
4/10
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