Redacted (2007): C

Brian De Palma’s Redacted uses a variety of multimedia means to fictionally recount the true-life 2006 rape and murder of a young Iraqi woman by U.S. soldiers: surveillance camera footage, YouTube-ish Internet videos, a pretentious French documentary, and, most of all, the camcorder diary of Private Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz) shot during his tour of duty. As implied by his film’s title – a term that refers to material removed from a document – De Palma is interested in confronting the way in which truth about the war is presented. And thus, the deliberate phoniness of his various aesthetics (which always seem purposefully stagy) is an intentional attempt to illustrate the unreliability of media-filtered information. Or at least, that’s the best excuse I can come up with for the awful awkwardness of Redacted, a furious diatribe against the U.S. military and – even more so – against the government and media’s willful manipulation of reality that misses no opportunity to have one-dimensional characters (all embodied with embarrassingly wholesale amateurishness) conveniently spout talking points about the various facets of the war. De Palma apparently intends for his film, which follows the soldiers’ transition from palling around to committing heinous atrocities, to play out like a hodgepodge of self-consciously artificial visuals and didactic dialogue. Yet that doesn’t mean it’s a tolerable tack to take, and more often than not, Redacted feels like the work of a director so righteously angry and so pleased with his formal experimentation that he doesn’t realize how painfully, inelegantly obvious he’s being.