Meanwhile, the better-educated barracks intellectual Blix (Kel O’Neil) is archly reading John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra, the humane Lawyer (are we expected to believe that’s a real name?) takes the ‘Michael J. The jury is also out on whether it’s stereotyping or undeniably true to depict the two kill-crazy rapists as white trash clods - they ineptly machine-gun a pregnant woman at the checkpoint, stupidly get Sergeant Sweet (Ty Jones) killed by playfully shoving him onto a dumped armchair containing an IED as he’s lecturing them on safety precautions (they claim their subsequent ‘raid’ is an attempt to avenge their ‘buddy’ Sweet, who plainly hated them) and incoherently rant about the need to kill or be killed in the face of an overwhelmingly hostile population (Carroll and Sherman are frighteningly good in the roles, though). The film doesn’t deal with – or even confirm – what happens when or if Salazar’s footage of the rape and murder (recorded on a helmet minicam his buddies don’t know about) leaks out onto the internet or is used in a court of law similarly, security cam footage of the prime instigators – wannabe gangster Reno Flake (Patrick Carroll) and chubby lech BB Rush (Daniel Stewart Sherman) – discussing their deeds and threatening conscience-stricken NCO Lawyer McCoy (Rob Devaney) ought to have been used against them (the film doesn’t even tell us whether or how severely the villains are punished).
However, like a surprising number of films which take this approach, DePalma fails to take into account the fact that recorded material becomes a part of the story – aside from other considerations, all this footage is evidence and in the real world this incident would have become more notorious than the crime which inspired the story simply because it was caught on video. If nothing else, Redacted is far more convincing and affecting than the slicker, conventionally-made, stodgy and pompous Casualties of War.
#Redacted 2007 tv
Based on an all-too-true story, it harks in style all the way back to DePalma’s surveillance-obsessed 1968 state-of-the-nation feature Greetings (which features a Vietnam scene in which a soldier makes a local girl strip on camera) by assembling a collage of images culled from the video diary of eager private Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz) who hopes his footage will ‘get him into film school’ (in a move which parallels Cloverfield, his camera passes into other hands late in the day), a deliberately arch and classically-scored French documentary called Barrages, newsclips from a fictional Arab TV station, youtube-like postings from a range of websites (Islamic jihadi, soldier’s wife, anti-war ranter), security-cam footage from a US base in Samarra, the recorded decapitation by insurgents of the luckless Salazar (in revenge for the rape, which he filmed but did not participate in) and videotaped debriefings, interviews and psychiatric counselling.īy shooting on DV and working from his own script, DePalma rediscovers the underground approach of his earliest, pre-Hollywood, pre-genre films. Obviously, he’s profoundly depressed to have to go through it all again, as another innocent is raped and killed by American soldiers who have essentially invaded her homeland, and yet more would-be decent comrades are traumatised to discover what their platoon buddies are capable of. In his ‘director’s statement’, Brian DePalma admits Redacted tells essentially the same story as his Vietnam-set Casualties of War.
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