Reviews

Redacted

The camera war

By PETER KEOUGH | November 14, 2007

2.5 Stars

REDACTED: Conflicting images of war.

The Iraq War movies are starting to resemble the war itself: miscalculated, mishandled, unpopular, and with no end in sight. Brian De Palma’s Redacted has at least aroused some outrage, if only because it turns one of the worst atrocities of the debacle into a glib commentary on the elusive nature of truth and images. At a checkpoint in Samarra, a bored soldier (Iggy Diaz) records his experiences on video in the hope of using the material to get into film school. Meanwhile, a French film crew is shooting him and his unit for a documentary, adding to a growing mélange of cable-news broadcasts, Web sites, and security cameras recording, exploiting, and spewing forth mutually reflective images. Didn’t Francis Coppola already make the same point about media unreality with a single cameo in Apocalypse Now? Despite the pretensions, the truth — soldiers raping a minor and killing her and her family — persists no matter who is holding the camera. 90 minutes | Kendall Square

Related: Heavy casualties, Master of war, The medium is the movie, More

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In 1989, filmmaker Brian De Palma directed the potent Hollywood feature Casualties of War , taking his audience back in time to a vile true-life incident from Vietnam.
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Theater of war
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Americans will finally know who Steve Coogan is.
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