Redacted (2007)

• Year: 2007
• Released: 16 Nov 2007
• Country: United States, Canada
• Adwords: 6 wins & 2 nominations
• IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0937237/
• Rotten Tomatoes: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/redacted
• Metacritics: https://www.metacritic.com/movie/redacted
• Available in: 720p, 1080p,
• Language: English, French, Arabic, German
• MPA Rating: R
• Genre: Crime, Thriller, War
• Runtime: 90 min
• Writer: Brian De Palma
• Director: Brian De Palma
• Cast: Patrick Carroll, Rob Devaney, Izzy Diaz
• Keywords: murder, found footage, soldier, journalist, iraq war,

	6.1/10
	52/100
	45% – Critics
	45% – Audience

Redacted Storyline

A montage of stories about U.S. soldiers fighting in the Iraq conflict, focusing on the modern forms of media covering the war.

Redacted Play trailer

Redacted Photos

Redacted Torrents Download

Redacted Subtitles Download

Redacted Movie Reviews

Impact is extremely powerful

Brian de Palma’s Redacted ups the ante of protest films, fictionally recounting the rape and murder of a 14-year old Iraqi girl by U.S. soldiers in 2006. Using hand-held camera surveillance footage, Internet videos, excerpts from a French documentary and an Arab TV channel, Islamic fundamentalist websites, and the fictional camcorder diary of a young U.S. private, Redacted lets us know not only about the atrocities of war but about the unreliability of the way in which information is presented in the media and how we cannot trust what we see, even in his film.

Modeled after de Palma’s earlier Casualties of War, Redacted searches for a truth in fiction that is deeper than reality-based documentary. Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz) carries a video camera around shooting whatever he sees hoping to make a documentary that will be his ticket to film school. We are first introduced to his unit: Gabe Blix (Kel O’Neil), Lawyer McCoy (Rob Devaney), Sergeant Jim Sweet (Ty Jones) and good ol’ boys, Reno Flake (Patrick Carroll) and B.B. Rush (Daniel Stewart Sherman). The videos make it apparent that our soldiers have lost their sense of purpose and are no longer on solid emotional ground.

The hand held video camera is then replaced by a French documentary about the soldier’s routine at checkpoints in Samarra. Suddenly, a speeding car is approaching. Interpreting the signals by U.S. personnel to slow down as meaning they are being waved on through, the car is gunned down, killing a pregnant woman and her unborn child as the driver After a member of Salazar’s unit is killed by a bomb, the two men who fired on the speeding car, Rush and Flake, invade the home of an Iraqi family in retribution and to enjoy the “spoils of war”. In the middle of the night, they rape and murder a fourteen-year old girl, kill her family, and set the house on fire.

The sensitive Blix does not want to be involved with the mission, and McCoy goes along to try and prevent more harm but fails to stop the violence. Flake and Rush tell the rest of the company that any word of this incident will result in their death. The incident is seen only with a flickering light and the actual assault takes place off camera, but the scene nonetheless elicits a feeling of disgust. As if to try and show that the horrors of war are not limited to one side, de Palma shows the abduction and beheading of a U.S. soldier in very graphic terms. In the final gut wrenching sequence, a montage labeled “Collateral Damage” brings truth and fiction together as we see actual footage of Iraqi war victims mixed with staged deaths and faces that are redacted with black pens.

While Redacted is flawed by inconsistent acting and overly didactic add-ons, its impact is extremely powerful. De Palma indicts both the stupidity of the U.S. government for initiating the war, the complicity of the media in presenting us with a sanitized version of it, and a culture in which such atrocities are permitted to occur. Like the films of French director Bruno Dumont that show how meaningless violence generates more meaningless violence, the visceral impact of Redacted will stay with you for a long time. Slapping us in the face to show us how we have lost touch with the reality of war, the film is full of elemental passion, untidy, disjointed, and at times over-the-top, but in Dumont’s words, it returns us “to the body, to the heart, to truth”.

won’t be for everyone- it’s an experimental drama-documentary by Brian De Palma- but it has an effectiveness in a ‘lack’ of style

The legendary words of Marshall MacLoughan, “The media IS the message”, couldn’t be further seen played out as in Redacted, Brian De Palma’s latest film which ventures the director back into his experimental early days as a filmmaker in New York city. In his film, the media is the message, but only in part- it’s about how media is used, or how subjective perceptions are taken into account, for coverage of a conflict which ironically enough has not had the kind of coverage seen in America as in the local Iraq and European media. But what stays true to De Palma as an auteur is the idea of voyeurism, or the watchers and the audience as the ones who continue to watch, and like Godard with his video experiments, Redacted is about its subject but it’s also about process.

Like Blair Witch Project, we’re seeing things “as-they-happen” by the view-point of a camera that a soldier, Angel, is carrying and using as an in to get into film school someday. This might be enough for a film covering a horrible tragic turn of events like depicted in Redacted, where two soldiers rape a teenager and kill and burn her and her baby sister. But De Palma’s story, based on real events which were “fictionalized” up to a point only for legal reasons, indicts the whole process of viewing things through the filter of the lens. Of course there are moments when the characters realize that they’re on video, and suddenly they either get irate and continue acting as themselves, or they start to posture for the camera. Instead of the carefully plotted and directed shots of films like Dressed to Kill or Carlito’s Way (or, for that matter, the similar-in-premise Casualties of War) we get the messiness of raw camera-work from the soldier, the embedded journalists, the news media covering the story, web-casts obviously out of you-tube, and as the one “official” kind of film-making a French documentary crew doing a film on the group of soldiers covering the checkpoint.

It’s suffice to say that this technique is almost a comment on itself, and it’s one of the curious ideas behind the experiment of Redacted that makes it interesting. We know that when a security camera or when Angel’s camera put on a seat meant to be shut off captures objectively what’s going on- like the “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” scene or the plot to go after the family. But there’s an inverse to this as well since De Palma is filming this with a script and with actors (who arguably are good at being naturalistic two-dimensional soldiers), since there is a stylization, yet without calling attention to the self-consciousness the audience feels during this. And meanwhile, De Palma makes his anti-war film gripping in the unexpected places; a hard-ass sergeant who gets blown up without any warning at all; the death of one of the soldiers as revenge from a terrorist group; the scene with Flake and Rush where they take the camera themselves and (as proof beyond a doubt that war and repeated tours of duty have made them bat-s***) defend themselves while attempting to praise a fallen brother while one wears a duck hat.

One almost hopes the experiment would work even better as one of the director’s best, which ultimately it isn’t. Certain tactics, like making evident the pretentiousness of the French documentary by having Barry Lyndon orchestrations playing over, or the girl on the fake you-tube site blasting the soldiers, just don’t work at all. And a few of the performances could use some tweaking. But Redacted, I think, has some bad rap attached to it. It’s not simply about the obvious, which is that war is hell and brings out the absolute worst out of human beings who have no control over themselves once pushed beyond reason. It’s also about the means of viewing something of the ultimate routine nightmare like a checkpoint, or the rape of the girl (so much that Angel can’t even watch as the “fly on the wall”), or a questioning, that makes it a significant effort. De Palma distinguishes his film, for better or worse, by adding the connotation of what it means to watch, or what it means to get on record, or what it does to break the ‘fourth wall’ while questioning it during it. It has the same free-form ambition of De Palma’s best experimental work- Hi, Mom!- if not much a great film in the end.

One thing’s for sure- it’s in a rightful place playing only in one theater in New York city; it’s the kind of work that is hard to market beyond playing as an experimental piece. Ironically, as of late, it’s been attacked by Bill O’Reilly WHILE it’s being advertised during the show! Talk about counter-programming for an audience that, for the most part, until it’s out on DVD, won’t have a lick of what the picture really entails. Message?

A Terrible Incident Turned In To A Fairly Terrible Film

On the 12th of March 2006 five American soldiers of the 101st Airborne walked in to a house outside the village of Yusufiyah in Iraq and murdered a mother , a father and a six year old child . After this they took turns to rape the fourteen year old daughter before killing her . This crime became known The Mumudiya Killings . This shocking crime was later turned in to a compelling book by Jim Frederick entitled Black Hearts in 2010 . Three years prior to this Brian DePalma made a highly fictionalised account called REDACTED

DePalma doesn’t seem an obvious choice for this type of story since he has a highly idiosyncratic camera style . That said he did make CASUALTIES OF WAR which was thematically very similar to this REDACTED though be it set in Vietnam rather than Iraq . The director’s cinematic style is entirely different from what we’ve been used to for many years . Here instead of a camera voyeuristic moving around we have a cinema verite style complete with internet clips and a cast involving unknown actors ad-libbing

The unfortunate thing is that DePalma seems way out of his depth . He fails to develop the story in anyway . Reading the Frederick’s book you’re aware of the brutality B Company 501st Infanrty Regiment 101st Airborne Division were experiencing with a casualty rate similar to that experienced during the Second World War . Regardless of your opinion of the war ( I was against it ) it is essential reading for the often incomprehensible nature of an insurgency conflict . REDACTED fails to give anything about the background or the context of what might have led to this type of atrocity against innocent civilians . The platoon in question see one of their comrades killed but apart from that there’s no real inciting incident , there’s no real character motivation and that’s the fundamental failing of the film

The second major failing is that the actors are fairly dreadful but I should qualify this by saying it’s almost certainly not their fault because their characters have the depth of rice paper . None of this is helped by having to spontaneously spout dialogue off the top of their heads . Make no mistake you can see DePalma shouting through a loudhailer” okay you’re a soldier in Iraq so pretend you’re in a war-zone and … ACTION ” . This type of acting style might work in British social dramas but not in a plot driven American war film and it shows

This is a very sensitive , harrowing subject matter for a film and it deserves some reverence to say the least. It’s almost certain if this film is to go by that DePalma was against the war in Iraq and it’s perhaps not surprising that many people who have praised REDACTED are similarly against the invasion. Regardless of my own politics I can only comment on it as a movie fan and this is a fairly poor film . One can only hope that if Hollywood get round to adapting Black Hearts they can do the full story justice for the sake of fourteen year old Abeer Qasim Hamza and her family in a conflict that saw aid workers being decapitated on the internet by insurgents