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.
Master of war
This article originally appeared in the June 26, 1987 issue of the Boston Phoenix.
The medium is the movie
In almost every movie you go to these days you’ll see another screen — a television, a computer, even another movie screen — within the screen you’re watching.
Theater of war
Saving Private Ryan reprised the glory days of GI Joes fighting nobly at Normandy, but it certainly didn’t spawn a comeback of World War II combat flicks.
Where are the movies on the war in Iraq?
Oscar Wilde might have called 9/11 “the day we dare not speak its name.” He would have been correct, at least, that we dared not speak its name to make a buck — until now.
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