Redacted
2007
***½
Director: Brian De Palma
Cast: Ty Jones, Kel O'Neill, Daniel Stewart Sherman, Izzy Diaz, Rob Devaney, Patrick Carroll, Mike Figueroa, Happy Anderson
Brian De Palma's daring and provocative war drama revolves around a handful of U.S. soldiers who man a checkpoint in Iraq. When one of them dies in an IED blast, it drives few of the disheartened men off the edge to carry out a horrible act of retribution. The film is heavily anti-war, and it doesn't portray the U.S. Army or the servicemen in a very favourable light. Some of the men in the unit are semi-illiterate thugs who seem to be in Iraq just to avoid prison time. The story is told through a variety of modern media: one soldier's video diary, another one's wife's online blog, CCTV and TV news footage, clips from a fictional French documentary, and Internet videos posted by the insurgents. This innovative approach sounds gimmicky but it isn't, mainly because the captivating narrative didn't allow me time to pay attention to it. The script is loosely based on a real event. De Palma's Casualties of War (1989) took place in Vietnam but dealt with exactly the same topic.
