Redacted

There are two separate battles for hearts and minds being lost in Brian ‘Casualties of War’ De Palma’s ‘Redacted’, the latest and possibly the darkest and strangest of the recent barrage of Iraq war films. The first, on the ground, is that waged on behalf of the poor war-torn Iraqis, the various ‘shit birds’, ‘sandniggers’ and ‘ragheads’ who seem so murderously ungrateful to people such as Specialist Flake (Patrick Carroll), part of a US Army contingent on prolonged tour at the Samarra border post.

The second, above and around it, is the psych-ops war raging in the interactive global media, engaged head-on by De Palma in taking central character, Private Angel ‘Sally’ Salazar (Izzy Diaz)’s unexpurgated DV footage (including, centrally, his take on a multiple rape and arson), as his primary point of view. De Palma adds –  to disorientating effect –  numerous other cyber sources, from internet postings (notably from ‘Just a Soldier’s Wife’ website), video journals, conferences to Al Jazeera-style broadcasts.

Reportedly, De Palma’s primary motor was anger and dismay; the bizarre, bitter tone of ‘Redacted’ runs closer to chaos and self disgust. The film is terrible; possibly, De Palma’s worst-directed  movie ever, playing like a ‘swede’ of his own style, indulging all his movie-pack penchants, from sick, slacker comedy to bad amateur dramatics to empty, nasty, wham-bam horror kinetics.

But, despite that, it could well prove  his most enduring; a sign of its insensate times, semiotically speaking, which offers an extraordinary, if accidental, vision of  ‘visionlessness’ and debasement. War was ever a Kubrick-ian hell-ride, futile, fundamentally unheroic and de-humanising, but now it’s mocked by a mad multimedia accompaniment innocent of all real ethical, moral and humanitarian value.