Review of Redacted (2007) by Davida — 29 Nov 2007

Brian De Palma's "Redacted" argues that the horrors of the Iraq war are being kept from us by inept or venal news media and the government's propaganda machine. That's a tenable premise for a provocative documentary; the horrors of every war elude description, and Mr.

De Palma is clearly desperate to get a purchase on the chaotic nature of this one. But his film isn't a documentary. It's a work of propaganda in its turn, a digitally photographed meditation on our media-saturated age in which our men in uniform, like the news crews that cover them, create their own realities by shooting digital video of their exploits.

The film's core is a speculative and utterly unconvincing reconstruction of an incident that reportedly involved, among many horrors, the rape and savage killing of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by members of a U.

S. army squad. The Americans are portrayed with varying degrees of loathsomeness, but there's not much variety in the film. It's all an awful aberration. Why not make a film about the many rapes of Iraqi women by their fellow Muslims? Or about how many U.

S. troops have saved countless women from the mass raping of Uday and Qusay Hussein or the rapes by their fighting Sunni and Shi'ite co-religionists? Well, DePalma would never do movies on those things.

Because, hey, they aren't anti-American. And that would portray the Muslims, not American troops, in a bad light. And we can't have that in Hollywood.