Movie Review: Redacted

Of all the 70s movie brats – Spielberg, Scorsese, Lucas, Coppola etc – few have experienced success and failure in equal measure as Brian De Palma. After a run of increasingly woeful excursions in Hollywood – think Snake Eyes, Mission to Mars and The Black Dahlia – De Palma returns to his low-budget roots with Redacted.

The film was shot on high-def video for an American cable channel, and looks at life in Iraq for a squad of American soldiers in typically controversial style.

Longtime De Palma fans might find Redacted's central plot, which focuses upon the brutal rape of an Iraqi girl by out-of-control American soldiers, a little familiar – that's because it is essentially the same story as his 1988 Vietnam epic Casualties Of War. Maybe De Palma arrived on set and realised he hadn't actually written a story so had to plunder that earlier film.

In any case, this is a much rawer, less-polished affair. It may be a world away in terms of subject matter, but Redacted actually has a lot in common with George Romero's recent zombie-fest Diary of the Dead, in that the entire film is pieced together from found footage. This includes camcorder footage shot by one of the soldiers, an arty French documentary, CCTV footage, websites and so on. De Palma is far more successful than Romero is using this technique, and creates a believable, often scary portrait of day-to-day life in the war zone.

Redacted isn't exactly a subtle film, and despite De Palma's passion for the subject, doesn’t really tell us anything we don't know. Like Casualties Of War, the soldiers are divided into two groups – naïve idealists and brutish thugs – and this simplistic approach undercuts the realism that the director has worked so hard elsewhere to develop.

Nevertheless, it's often powerful stuff, and any film that gets the likes of loud-mouthed, right-wing idiot pundit Bill O'Reilly in such a froth is to be commended.