Redacted (2007)--3/5

In "Redacted," another Iraq War movie that nobody saw, a spiral of violence in Iraq leads to the rape and murder of an Iraqi family by American soldiers. The film is made to look like various formats of "found" footage. Some of the sources are a soldier's video diary, a French documentary, and YouTube.

Since the sixties, Brian De Palma has been playing with voyeurism on film. In "Hi, Mom!," Robert De Niro is an unlovable loser who rents an apartment in order to spy on the tenants living in the building next door. John Travolta, in "Blow Out," becomes obsessed by an audio recording of a possible murder. "Redacted" is the essential De Palma film about voyeurism. Every shot implicates at least two characters: the filmer and the watcher.

Scene/format changes bring up the reasoning behind the person controlling the camera. The French documentarians are furthering their arthouse and anti-American credentials. The soldier's wife on YouTube is getting her thoughts down in the best way she knows.

"The Blair Witch Project" and "Cloverfield" are problematic because they only use one perspective; the movies become more ludicrous the longer they go on. Why would anybody still be filming? "Redacted" solves this problem by changing perspectives and by using (mostly) reasonable set-ups.

Of more interest is the responsibility put on the audience. The footage is from such varying--and sometimes classified--sources, that only a few people could actually be able and allowed to see all of it. Tellingly, in a movie titled "Redacted," none of this footage is actually redacted. This implies that we are caught up in the creation of the story. We are the censors for public consumption. A turning point comes in the film when a member of the squad posts an anonymous YouTube video to tell about the crimes. At this point, something has to be done to appease the public. What follows is a farce that sweeps the crime under the rug.