The mockumentary was an unfortunate byproduct of the Neorealist movement, using a genre associated with “truth” to portray a fictional story, either to fool the viewer or add a layer of verisimilitude to something that’s inherently false. Redacted is an abhorrent story, atrociously acted and filmed in a deliberately amateurish fashion with cheap prosumer cameras. Are we supposed to be impressed that Brian De Palma is conducting a masturbatory exercise in “cinema verite” to deliver the old saw about war making monsters of decent men? He already made that point, badly, in Casualties of War, only this time the events take place in Iraq and aren’t exactingly framed and choreographed. Was it really necessary to repackage the same message for the YouTube generation?

Okay, so anyone with a decent Internet connection has access to any number of filmed atrocities, anyone who subscribes to a newspaper has an ever changing gallery of horrors for their reading pleasure. In the future, the level of detail and breadth of information can only increase. The thesis of Redacted seems to be “this is what you’re not seeing”, as would be suggested by the title. Yet the film doesn’t tell us anything of worth, pretending that the fact of collateral damage is in itself worthy of magnifying and rubbing in the audience’s face. Most insultingly, De Palma must cheat to convey information that the mockumentary framework is too weak to support; reverse angles and mysterious POV shots indicate that this “realism” is really just the same obsessively choreographed procession of ugliness found in umpteen Serious War Dramas.

What of the “villains”, who might as well paint their camo helmets black and twirl their mustaches? High school caliber acting aside, their characters have no motivations or humanity under their husks of personae. The hero seems to have ESP and keeps his camera running constantly, never needing to change batteries, rest or deal with technical problems. This was easy to oversee in Cloverfield, but here the story is so drawn out, obvious, and unpleasant that one’s mind invariably wanders. Is there even a reward for sitting through 90 minutes of one-dimensional “drama”, self-righteous arguing in favor of something to which no one is opposed, shakycam, and choreographed “reality”? Sure, there’s some shots of mutilated corpses, charred corpses, bleeding men and women who’ll soon be corpses, ad naus.

Anyone who’d exploit real deaths to further his own agenda does not deserve to be called an artist, anyone who’d stoop so low deserves to have his directing privileges revoked for life. The awful coda of Waltz with Bashir committed a similar sin, but Ari Folman was actually present at said scene and the preceding 90 minutes were endlessly inventive. Brian De Palma is a fucking hack who’d be damned if he ever would set foot in an actual war zone, so he did the next best thing and damned himself by making this atrocity.

Tags: brian de palma, casualties of war, redacted

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